wrapper command to record network use of a command

Is there any command like time that can record a process's network I/O stats and print them on exit?

Linux (and other *nix) has the time command that lets you record execution times - not just wall-clock time, but kernel and system CPU time, memory allocations, disk I/O activity and more. It's useful because it can be run as a simple command wrapper and tracks children too.

e.g.

$ TIME="t=%E; I/O=%I:%O" time find $HOME > /dev/null
t=0:08.78; I/O=821408:0

but the network counters %r and %s only count send()/recv() calls; no TCP and no data volume. So they're not useful for network activity.

I've confirmed with

TIME="t=%E; I/O=%I:%O" time wget $somewebsite -O /dev/null

that socket read/write doesn't count for I/O and nor do dummy devices. Same for stdio. It only seems to track filesystem reads and writes.

But where can I get network stats?

I know I could use numerous tools like:

• wireshark / tshark / tcpdump
• ss / netstat
• lsof
• nethogs / iptraf / iftop / tcptrack
• strace (slow, fine-grained)

but none of them make it simple to target just one process or process tree and record its total network activity over its lifetime.

I know it's possible to set socat up as a proxy. But that's also very awkward; it can't just run as a wrapper.

perf can do it, but it's very platform specific and can be fragile.

Surely there's something basic and commonplace out there that either:

• intercepts network calls with LD_PRELOAD and collects stats on them; or
• uses network namespaces (Linux) to collect all activity for the process group and measures that

?