Passive monitoring of sockets on Linux

26 July 2013 A project I have worked on lately required me to passively monitor the state of a large number of TCP sockets. There are different ways of achieving this. One can for example parse the content of /proc/net/tcp, or work some tcpdump/libpcap-magic to get close to real-time information. My only requirement was to collect a snapshot of the state of the sockets every X second, so using lib