Skip to content

Library does not initialise on Linux #308

@vgaj

Description

@vgaj

When using the library on Linux it fails to start up with the following exception:
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.base/java.util.Objects.requireNonNull(Objects.java:209)
at java.base/sun.nio.fs.UnixFileSystem.getPath(UnixFileSystem.java:263)
at java.base/java.nio.file.Path.of(Path.java:147)
at java.base/java.nio.file.Paths.get(Paths.java:69)
at org.pcap4j.core.NativeMappings.(NativeMappings.java:46)

I was using the library via Maven dependency

org.pcap4j
pcap4j-core
2.0.0-alpha.6

Looking at the code we can see that it's trying to use an environment variable called "SystemRoot" which won't exist when running on Linux.
static final File NPCAP_DIR =
Paths.get(System.getenv("SystemRoot"), "System32", "Npcap").toFile();

To work around the problem all you need to do is to define the environment variable before starting the application using the library. So there is an easy work around.
export SystemRoot=""

However updating the code with a Platform.isWindows() check will avoid having to do this.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions