Copyright (c) 1994, 1996, 1997
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that: (1) source code distributions
retain the above copyright notice and this paragraph in its entirety, (2)
distributions including binary code include the above copyright notice and
this paragraph in its entirety in the documentation or other materials
provided with the distribution, and (3) all advertising materials mentioning
features or use of this software display the following acknowledgement:
``This product includes software developed by the University of California,
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and its contributors.'' Neither the name of
the University nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse
or promote products derived from this software without specific prior
written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
#include <pcap/pcap.h>typedef void (*pcap_handler)(u_char *user, const struct pcap_pkthdr *h, const u_char *bytes);
int pcap_loop(pcap_t *p, int cnt, pcap_handler callback, u_char *user); int pcap_dispatch(pcap_t *p, int cnt, pcap_handler callback, u_char *user);
pcap_dispatch() processes packets from a live capture or ``savefile'' until cnt packets are processed, the end of the current bufferful of packets is reached when doing a live capture, the end of the ``savefile'' is reached when reading from a ``savefile'', pcap_breakloop() is called, or an error occurs. Thus, when doing a live capture, cnt is the maximum number of packets to process before returning, but is not a minimum number; when reading a live capture, only one bufferful of packets is read at a time, so fewer than cnt packets may be processed. A value of -1 or 0 for cnt causes all the packets received in one buffer to be processed when reading a live capture, and causes all the packets in the file to be processed when reading a ``savefile''.
(In older versions of libpcap, the behavior when cnt was 0 was undefined; different platforms and devices behaved differently, so code that must work with older versions of libpcap should use -1, nor 0, as the value of cnt.)
callback specifies a pcap_handler routine to be called with three arguments: a u_char pointer which is passed in the user argument to pcap_loop() or pcap_dispatch() , a const struct pcap_pkthdr pointer pointing to the packet time stamp and lengths, and a const u_char pointer to the first caplen (as given in the struct pcap_pkthdr a pointer to which is passed to the callback routine) bytes of data from the packet.
pcap_dispatch() returns the number of packets processed on success; this can be 0 if no packets were read from a live capture (if, for example, they were discarded because they didn't pass the packet filter, or if, on platforms that support a read timeout that starts before any packets arrive, the timeout expires before any packets arrive, or if the file descriptor for the capture device is in non-blocking mode and no packets were available to be read) or if no more packets are available in a ``savefile.'' It returns -1 if an error occurs or -2 if the loop terminated due to a call to pcap_breakloop() before any packets were processed. If your application uses pcap_breakloop(), make sure that you explicitly check for -1 and -2, rather than just checking for a return value < 0.
If -1 is returned, pcap_geterr() or pcap_perror() may be called with p as an argument to fetch or display the error text.