Wireshark · Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Basic question about dissectors

[Graham Bloice <graham.bloice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2 March 2015 at 14:08, David Aldrich <David.Aldrich@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi

 

Please will someone tell me what is the file extension of a dissector and how one loads a dissector in Wireshark?

 

I have seen lots of help on how to write a dissector but I just need to know how to identify a dissector in a 3^rd party distribution file of Wireshark, and how to load it.

 

A dissector can be implemented in many ways and not all of them are separate files with a file extension.  I assume you're interested in Wireshark on Windows as you mention a file extension?

A dissector can be built into the Wireshark core as part of libwireshark.dll, it can be a plugin in the various plugin directories with a .dll extension (look in Help -> About -> Plugins), it could be a Lua dissector loaded at runtime form a Lua script file (probably with a .lua extension), it could be a WSGD dissector loaded at runtime from a text file, and for some older versions of Wireshark it could be a Python dissector loaded at runtime.

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Graham Bloice