Wireshark is a network traffic analyzer, or “sniffer” available for Linux, macOS, *BSD, other Unix and Unix-like operating systems, as well as for Windows that lets users see what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level. It’s a continuation of a project started in 1998.
The tool uses Qt as the GUI and libpcap and npcap as packet capture and filtering libraries. The distribution includes TShark, a line-oriented sniffer that has the same dissection, capture-file reading and writing, and packet filtering code as Wireshark.
Unified cloud and security company Sysdig Inc. recently announced the Wireshark Foundation that would provide long-term custodian work for the project.
Official installation packages are available for Microsoft Windows and macOS, but the Wireshark project builds and tests regularly on Linux (Ubuntu) too and is available as either a standard or add-on package for many popular operating systems.
In order to build Wireshark, Python 3 is a necessary component. Furthermore, AsciiDoctor is needed to construct the documentation, including the main pages. Additionally, Perl and flex are essential for generating some of the source code.
