ngrep
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PCAPPCAPA packet capture, recorded network packets that can be inspected later. Analysts use it to reconstruct communication and investigate protocol behavior or suspicious traffic.-based network packet analyzer that matches extended regular or hexadecimal expressions against packet data payloads.
Summary
ngrep is an open-source, free command-line tool that applies grep-style regular expression matching to network packet payloads captured via PCAP. It runs from the terminal (or as a Docker container against a live interface), reading captured traffic or a pcap file and filtering it with BPFBPFA Linux kernel virtual machine that lets programs attach small, sandboxed bytecode filters to kernel hooks — syscalls, network events, tracepoints — so cyber tools can observe or redirect kernel behaviour without writing a kernel module. logic similar to tcpdump, while its regex or hex matching narrows results to specific payload patterns. It suits people debugging plaintext protocols like HTTP, IMAP, DNS or SIPSIPSession Initiation Protocol, an IETF signaling standard for setting up and tearing down real-time voice and video calls over IP networks, giving cyber tools a structured way to intercept, fuzz, or analyze VoIP traffic., and those analyzing suspicious traffic from malware or compromised hosts, rather than teams wanting a full packet-analysis GUIGUIA graphical user interface, controls such as windows, buttons and menus. It lets people use software visually rather than entering commands.. Its own README compares it directly to GNU grep and to tools like tcpdump and snoop, positioning it as their regex-driven counterpart. Started in 2000 and still active, with 13 contributors and 159 commits in the past year, the project last released 194 days ago.
PCAP-based network packet analyzer that matches extended regular or hexadecimal expressions against packet data payloads.
How ngrep helps
Which plaintext protocol exchanges are actually failing between these two hosts?
filters the capture (or live interface) to the conversation with BPF logic, then matches the regex against payload text so the request/response bodies causing the failure are printed directly to the terminal
Is this host talking to something it shouldn't be?
scans captured or live traffic for payload patterns typical of malware or command-and-control chatter and prints every matching packet with its source and destination, letting suspicious sessions be picked out from normal ones
Did a credential or cookie actually go out over this connection in plaintext?
matches a regex against the payload of each packet and shows the full header and body text of every hit, so a captured login or session cookie is visible in the output
Which packets in this old capture file match a pattern I only just learned to look for?
rereads a saved pcap file offline and applies the same regex/hex matching used on live traffic, reporting every matching packet without needing to recapture
Which containers were actually part of this traffic?
resolves the IP addresses in matched packets to Docker or Podman container names, using live event tracking when the container socket is reachable and falling back to periodic polling otherwise
Is there any traffic here at all matching what I'm looking for?
prints a row of markers for every non-matching packet and exits with a distinct status when nothing in the whole capture matched, distinguishing an empty result from a real one
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for ngrep, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail ngrep puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in jpr5/ngrep, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 2 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +1 joined · −1 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 6.6 years first maintainer reply 19 hours
- Open backlog 0 of 22 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 0
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 1,021
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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