["Paul Tretter" <ptretter@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes. I want to capture mostly the data portion of the delivery.  I have been
able to do this with Ethereal from the window however its to evident for my
purposes.  I want to create a utility that will capture for example the
total communications between MSN clients or AIM clients for example.  I know
I can do it as I have a very powerful parsing language.  My next questions
is - does Tethereal capture to standard ascii based file formats?  Also, is
there a mechanism for restarting the capture process from the command line
or does that mean to restart the whole application again.

Paul Tretter

----- Original Message -----
From: "Guy Harris" <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Paul Tretter" <ptretter@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 4:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Running from Command line and suppress the GUI


> > Is it possible to run Ethereal from the command line and suppress the
> > GUI
>
> No - Ethereal is a GUI application, so it makes no sense to suppress the
> GUI.  If you want a capture or analysis program that doesn't pop up any
> windows, use a non-GUI capture or analysis program, such as tcpdump,
> snoop...
>
> ...or Tethereal.
>
> > so that it can be launched with no trace from a batch file or other
> > script file language.
>
> What exactly is it you're trying to do here?  I.e., what do you want the
> program you're running to do?  Capture packets?  Read a capture file and
> send to its output a text dissection of the packets in the capture file?
> In either of those cases, you'd want to use something such as Tethereal,
> not Ethereal.