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Common Arguments

Fred Klassen edited this page Jul 21, 2026 · 1 revision

Common Arguments

Every tool in the Tcpreplay suite (tcpreplay, tcpreplay-edit, tcpprep, tcprewrite, tcpbridge, tcpliveplay, tcpcapinfo) gets these flags for free from the shared AutoOpts "tearoff" (libopts/) that all their CLI parsing is built on. Verified against the current 4.6.0-beta1 .def files.

Flag Purpose
--dbug=<level> Enable debugging output to STDERR. Requires building with --enable-debug (autotools) / -DENABLE_DEBUG=ON (CMake).
--verbose Print packet data using tcpdump (requires tcpdump on $PATH, or set it explicitly with --decode).
--decode=<args> Pass additional decoding arguments through to tcpdump when using --verbose.
--version Print version, copyright, and library information.
--save-opts=<file> Save the current configuration options to a file.
--load-opts=<file> Load configuration options from a file (or from a default rc file automatically, if present).
--help Print basic help for the given command.
--more-help Print detailed help for the given command (pipes through a pager).

These are separate from each tool's own specific options (--dlt, --endpoints, --portmap, ...) — see --help/--more-help on each binary, or the man pages at tcpreplay.appneta.com, for those.

See also: Usage Examples for these tools used together to solve real problems.


Adapted from the old commonargs page on the legacy Trac wiki (tcpreplay.synfin.net, no longer reachable — see the DLT Plugin Developer Guide for why), re-verified against the current tree.

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