Large-scale, free and open source packet capturing has (or more accurately at the time of the project's inception, had) a big problem. There was no ready-made solution for indexing traffic in plain-old .pcap files. There had been attempts made in the past to remedy this, some of which you can read about in the project's readme. However, they were all either abandoned or supremely convoluted. I wanted to address this with a small, portable, fast program, which eventually became pichi.

Now that the phenomenal arkime exists, this is no longer the case. Nevertheless, I plan on updating and patching pichi for as long as I can, purely to provide people with a feasible alternative.