Tcpdump works on most Unix-like operating systems: Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenWrt, macOS, HP-UX 11i, and AIX.

tcpdump was originally written in 1988 by Van Jacobson, Sally Floyd, Vern Paxson and Steven McCanne who were, at the time, working in the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Network Research Group.

Michael Richardson (mcr) and Bill Fenner created www.tcpdump.org in 1999. tcpdump prints the contents of network packets.

The user may optionally apply a BPF-based filter to limit the number of packets seen by tcpdump; this renders the output more usable on networks with a high volume of traffic.

In other Unix-like operating systems, the packet capturing mechanism can be configured to allow non-privileged users to use it; if that is done, superuser privileges are not required.