TL;DR

I’ve attempted to run Pcap4J on Bash on Windows (BoW) but it didn’t work due to lack of support for network staff in BoW.

What’s Bash on Windows

Bash on Windows is a feature released in Windows 10 Anniversary Update to add Linux fanctionalities to Windows.

With this feature, we can run Bash and several Linux commands on Windows.

It sounds similar to Cygwin and MinGW but actually different. Linux commands Cygwin and MinGW provides are Windows-native binaries. On the other hand, BoW enables to run Ubuntu instance as a subsystem of Windows and to execute Ubuntu-native binaries on it.

BoW can be easily installed by only 2 steps as per the installation guide.

Try Pcap4J in BoW

BoW can be started by bash command in command prompt.

C:\Users\kaitoy>bash
kaitoy@DESKTOP-41L0NMU:/mnt/c/Users/kaitoy$ uname -a
Linx DESKTOP-41L0NMU 3.4.0+ #1 PREEMPT Thu Aug 1 17:06:05 CST 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

In the bash, I ran the following commands to install Pcap4J dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk libpcap-dev

Then, I executed Pcap4J (org.pcap4j.sample.GetNextPacketEx) and got an error as follows:

$ java -cp pcap4j-core-1.6.2.jar:pcap4j-packetfactory-static-1.6.2.jar:pcap4j-sample-1.6.2.jar:jna-4.2.1.jar:slf4j-api-1.7.12.jar:logback-classic-1.0.0.jar:logback-core-1.0.0.jar org.pcap4j.sample.GetNextPacketEx
org.pcap4j.sample.GetNextPacketEx.count: 5
org.pcap4j.sample.GetNextPacketEx.readTimeout: 10
org.pcap4j.sample.GetNextPacketEx.snaplen: 65536


java.io.IOException: Return code: -1, Message: getifaddrs: Invalid argument
        at org.pcap4j.util.NifSelector.selectNetworkInterface(NifSelector.java:40)
        at org.pcap4j.sample.GetNextPacketEx.main(GetNextPacketEx.java:43)

This error seems due to lack of support for network staff in BoW.

BoW is still beta. I will try again after its production release.