It's only in bat files that % is treated specially, when you must say %% to mean the % char. So a batch file to text2pcap <name>.txt to <name>.eth might say:
text2pcap -t %%M:%%S. %1.txt %1.eth
That might be a reason to change text2pcap, but doesn't explain Tom's problem. His email implied command line, not batch file.
I think the problem was EOL characters. It sounds like Tom's original text file was made on a *NIX system and he tried to use it with the Win32 text2pcap. I reconstructed his file by copying and pasting from email in Win32, so my text file was "perfect" for DOS/Windows. Bad end-of-line characters could explain why his first line worked - text2pcap had not yet encountered any problem.
Quick way to convert unix text files to dos/windows, if they're not too big: Open the file with the dos edit command, save it (making no deliberate change) and exit.
Julian.
To: "Biot Olivier" <Olivier.Biot@xxxxxxxxxxx>, <jfielding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
cc: "'Ethereal user support'" <ethereal-users@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Ethereal-Dev" <Ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Re: [Ethereal-users] timestamp problem
Olivier Biot wrote:
> Hasn't this to do with the way the command shells in MS DOS/Windows expand
> environment variables with percent signs instead of a single dollar sign
on
> *NIX shells?
>
> I'd suggest to use another argument positioner than '%' (e.g., '@') to see
> if that fixes your problem.
Yes, that could be the case. It might be good to add support for another
argument positioner besides the percent character and
document that the precent sign may not work e.g. on Win98.
I also had similar problems when trying to set the column.format preference
value from the command line on Win98 (with the -o option).
I sometimes use some bat-scripts that changes the column.format in order to
get specific columns in the summary output from tethereal.
I didn't have so much time to look on the problem after I wrote my mails and
it was mainly on Win2000 that I needed to use
both these functionalities.