How to capture last N seconds of packets using tcpdump

How can I capture the last N seconds of packets using tcpdump?

If you just want tcpdump to run for n seconds and then quit, you could use timeout.

For example:

timeout 2 tcpdump -eni mon0

Otherwise I don't believe tcpdump has an option to do this.

I think the best way to accomplish this is with tcpdump's -G flag, which, when used with -w, will save your dump to a new file every N seconds. For instance:

tcpdump -w outfile-%s -G 10

This will create a new file with the name of 'outfile-XXXX' (where XXXX represents the number of seconds since epoch) every 10 seconds.

See the man pages for tcpdump(8) and strftime(3) for additional details.