Wireshark mailing list archives

Re: PCap-NG support in Wireshark and Tshark


From: Guy Harris <guy () alum mit edu>
Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2013 14:41:46 -0800


On Dec 18, 2013, at 4:46 AM, Matthias Lang <wireshark () matthias fastmail fm> wrote:

3. Wireshark can read a Pcap from stdin, but not Pcap-NG.

  The following works fine:

./wireshark -r /tmp/dumpcap.pcapng

  But the following gets me a "Unrecognized libpcap format" dialog box:

./wireshark -k -i - < /tmp/dumpcap.pcapng

  I get the same dialog box if I do this:

cat /tmp/dumpcap.pcapng > /tmp/a_named_pipe  &
wireshark -k -i /tmp/a_named_pipe

That's better stated as "Wireshark can capture from a pipe if handed a pcap file, but not if handed a pcap-ng file"; 
Wireshark can't *read* from a pipe, but it can *capture* from a pipe and write the packets to a file (the packets 
*have* to be in a file in Wireshark, so that it can seek and re-read arbitrary packets).

And there's currently no code in dumpcap (which is what's reading from the pipe) to handle pcap-ng files, so, no, 
neither Wireshark nor TShark nor dumpcap can capture from a pipe if what's being written to the pipe is a pcap-ng file.

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