[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Is it possible to override the preferences when running tethereal from the
> command line?

Some of them, yes.  Protocol preferences, for example, can be overridden
with the "-o" flag.  (Yes, I know, the man page doesn't enumerate the
names of the preferences; nobody's gotten around to writing the stuff to
have Ethereal and Tethereal take a special command-line flag to print
out information about the preference names, and a script to insert that
into the man page, as is done with, for example, fields on which you can
filter.)

However:

> I can change the columns that I want sorted into a file by using the
> Ethereal GUI and updating the preferences file. What I would like is to
> write a script that will run a tethereal command line on any machine and
> format the columns in the output file no matter what the preference file is
> set to.

the list of columns doen't happen to be one of them; nobody's written
the code to do that.