I want to be able to start and stop an NGREP process from inside my python code. I really dont have experience with python on a system level.

Normally I run NGREP from the command line, but I would like to be able to run it from a script every hour and capture the trace and then process the results.

Can anyone point me in the direction of how to achieve this.

By the way, I really just need to be able to do a packet capture, perhaps Python has builtin capabilities for this, maybe tcpdump?

Thanks.