Tcpdump & Wireshark Cheat Sheet

Oz

5 min read

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Jan 5, 2026

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A practical, copy-paste friendly network traffic analysis guide for Linux engineers, SOC analysts, Network specialists, and SREs.

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Table of Contents

Part 1 — Basics (For Everyone)

• Basic Tcpdump Usage
• Interface Management (-i, -D)
• Host & Network Filtering (IP and Subnet)
• Port & Protocol Basics (Service Filtering)
• Read & Write to Files (-w, -r)
• Output Control & Speed (-n, -N, -t)
• Basic Troubleshooting Flow
• Security Best Practices

Part 2 — Advanced Options & Analysis (Beginner → Advanced)

• Logical Operators (AND, OR, NOT)
• Packet Content Inspection (-A, -X, -XX)
• Verbosity & Snapshot Length (-v, -s)
• Directional Filtering (Inbound vs Outbound)
• Advanced TCP Flag Filtering…