Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] referencing specific tcp protocol data

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 02:21:31PM -0600, Gerald Combs wrote:
> How difficult would it be to integrate this with an embedded python, perl
> or <insert your favorite scripting language here> interpreter?

Would SWIG:

	http://www.swig.org/

be of any use here?

Are you thinking of embedding the interpreters in Ethereal and
Tethereal?  That might be nice, as it'd allow people to write
interpreted plugins to perform various types of processing on captures
from within Ethereal or Tethereal (the latter could be useful for, say,
batch processing; people here have looked into scripts to take packet
traces from customers and processing them to try to identify known types
of networking problems - I think they were planning on doing it by
reading the output of "tethereal -V", but that's really somewhat of a
painful way to do it).

> If we
> could do that, we might have a nice structure in place for building an
> expert system.

Yes, that's what I've been thinking as well - the "experts" that some
network analyzers have could possibly be implemented as
{Perl,Python,Ruby,Visual Basic,<pick your favorite scripting language}
scripts.