TCPDUMP – How to Process and Pipe Output in Realtime

pipetcpdump

If I want to tcpdump DNS requests by clients (on an OpenWrt 10.04 router), then I

root@ROUTER:/etc# tcpdump -n -i br-lan dst port 53 2>&1       
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on br-lan, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
22:29:38.989412 IP 192.168.1.200.55919 > 192.168.1.1.53: 5697+ A? foo.org. (25)
22:29:39.538981 IP 192.168.1.200.60071 > 192.168.1.1.53: 17481+ PTR? 150.33.87.208.in-addr.arpa. (44)
^C
2 packets captured
3 packets received by filter
0 packets dropped by kernel

That's fully ok. But. Why can't I pipe the tcpdumps output in realtime?

root@ROUTER:/etc# tcpdump -n -i br-lan dst port 53 2>&1 | awk '/\?/ {print $3}'
^C
root@ROUTER:/etc#

If I awk, etc. anything after tcpdump, I don't get ANY output. Why is that? Why can't I process the output of tcpdump with pipelining in realtime? (so that e.g.: in the example in only outputs the 3rd column)

Are there any solutions for this?

Best Answer

Straight out of man tcpdump

-l     Make stdout line buffered.  Useful if you want to see the data while 
       capturing it.  E.g.,

              tcpdump -l | tee dat

       or

              tcpdump -l > dat & tail -f dat

       Note that on Windows,``line buffered'' means ``unbuffered'', so that 
       WinDump will write each character individually if -l is specified.

       -U is similar to -l in its behavior, but it will cause output to be 
       ``packet-buffered'', so that the output is written to stdout at the 
       end of each packet rather than at the end of each line; this is 
       buffered on all platforms, including Windows.
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