["Julian Fielding" <jfielding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Guy Harris said:
>Dan S Zaniewski said:
>
>> 1. I need to know when the capture buffer is full.
>
>To what "capture buffer" are you referring?
[snip]

I think Dan meant "I've set Stop Capture after n Megabyte(s) and I'd like to know about how much has been captured so far". That's probably doable, but Ethereal doesn't do it at the moment.

You can look at the capture file with anything that reports file sizes like Windows explorer or DOS dir. The amount of data buffered in memory before writing to disk may vary with Ethereal version, compiler version and OS version, so the granularity of any external observation of file size will be variable. This probably won't matter with a big limit like 100M. With a small limit like 10k it's quite likely to go from 0 to 100% in one or two jumps. I've just tried 100k and it was quite smooth with my system. Not much traffic - total time 342 seconds. I could see it incrementing in single k in Windows explorer by hitting F5 (refresh) repeatedly.

It's a good idea to name the capture file for this, otherwise you've got to find it in temp.

For Ethereal to do this properly we need to also think about the other stop conditions: time and number of packets. Ideally whichever of these is enabled should be shown as a 0-100% progress bar, though it could be argued that time and packets are not so necessary. Number of packets is already displayed. For time, use any watch or clock.

Julian.