Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] [patch] tethereal and ring timeout

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From: Jeff Morriss <morriss@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 14:55:07 -0500


Guy Harris wrote:

On Sep 24, 2003, at 3:50 PM, Matthijs Melchior wrote:

I have also been looking to make the -l switch work with saving to files,
so that the buffer is flushed to disk every second or so. This would
enable me to have tethereal in background looking at the network and
use ethereal to view the most recent history using the tethereal files.
Ethereal would need a mode to start polling its input file fore more
data [and to make it really clever to switch files when the capture
process switches...].


We already have some of that - that's how "Update list of packets in real time" is implemented; there's one process doing the capture, and another process that gets messages from that process over a pipe and reads from the capture file when told by the capturing process that N packets have been added to the capture file.

Perhaps having an option for Tethereal to send messages to a named pipe file, and have Ethereal read messages from that named pipe file rather than from a pipe to a child capture process, would handle that.

Having a way for a 3rd-party process that's writing messages a file to tell Ethereal it's time to read the file again would be useful for me too (in the context of RawSS7 files). That or anything that would allow Ethereal to "update from a file in real time"...