[Richard Urwin <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 17 Oct 2003 3:07 pm, Preston Williams wrote:
> <P>I'm fairly new to Ethereal and recently loaded it up on one of my
> machines.&nbsp; I opened Ethereal, hit capture, start, and placed the
> source and destination port in filter box.&nbsp; When I hot OK I received
> the following error:&nbsp;Unable to parse filter string (parse
> error)!&nbsp; What am I doing wrong?&nbsp; Can someone point me in the
> right direction?

http://www.ethereal.com/faq.html#q5.5

Q 5.5: I can set a display filter just fine, but capture filters don't work.

A: Capture filters currently use a different syntax than display filters. 
Here's the corresponding section from the ethereal(1) man page:
...
Q 5.6: I'm entering valid capture filters, but I still get "parse error" 
errors.

A: There is a bug in some versions of libpcap/WinPcap that cause it to report 
parse errors even for valid expressions if a previous filter expression was 
invalid and got a parse error.
...

-- 
Richard Urwin