Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Limitations of Ethereal capture command line parameters (incompatible change needed?)

[Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>]

Hi List!

While having a look at the Ethereal command line parameters, I'd 
realized that some thing's that can be done using the capturing GUI 
aren't possible with the command line, see 
http://www.ethereal.com/docs/user-guide/ChCustCommandLine.html for 
explanations in the User's Guide.

That's a problem as I'm going to use these parameters in the upcoming 
seperated capture child program for privilege seperation (and I would 
like to share the code of command line parameter parsing).

... and of course it limits the possibilities of Ethereal's command line :-(


The things I've recognized missing (have a look at the capture options 
dialog for a better understanding):

1.) the (Win32 specific) "Buffer size: x megabyte(s)"  parameter can't 
be set (maybe adding a new -W option?)
2.) the number of files after stop capturing "Stop capture after x 
file(s)" can't be set (adding a "files" suboption to -a ?), BTW: this is 
not identical to the number of ringbuffer files!
3.) in order to set the duration of a ringbuffer file "Next file every x 
minute(s)", you must set the ringbuffer option, but today these two are 
independant (maybe add "file_duration" to -a and remove duration from 
ringbuffer option?)

I would think that 1.) and 2.) are easy, but 3.) would end up in having 
two ways to set the same duration value (ugly), or remove the -b 
duration option from the command line (which would be incompatible with 
previous versions, however I would prefer that one).

What do other's think?

Regards, ULFL