Including the functionality of a tool within another program?

Question

Hi there

I would like to write an application, for my own interest, that graphically visualizes some network concepts. Basically I would like to show the output from tools like ping, traceroute and nmap.

The most obvious approach seems to be to use pipes to call out to these tools from my C program, and process the information they return. However, I would like to avoid this heavy-handed approach if possible. My question is, is it possible to somehow link against these tools, or are there APIs that can be used to gain programatic access instead? If so, is this behavior available on a tool-by-tool basis only?

One reason for wanting to do this is to keep everything in a single process / address space and to avoid dependance on these external tools. For example, if I wrote an iphone application, I would not be able to spawn processes to call out to the external tools themselves.

Thanks for any advice or suggestions.

Answer 1

The networking API in your platform of choice is all you essentially need. ping, traceroute and nmap don't do any magic, all they do is send and receive packets over the network.

I don't know of any pre-existing libraries though (not that I have looked either). If it comes to it, at least ping and traceroute are quite trivial to implement by hand.

Answer 2

I depends on the platform you're developing for. Windows, for example, has an ICMP API that you could use to implement a ping tool.

On the other hand, the source code for ping and traceroute is available on any Linux system, so you could use that (provided the license was compatible with your needs) as the basis of your own programs.

Finally, ping (ICMP) is not hard to implement and traceroute builds on top of ping. It may be worth it to just roll your own implementation.