Ethereal-users: [Ethereal-users] Tethereal

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From: Garrick Ing <garrick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 20:55:16 -0500
Hi,

I am trying to turn a large trace file (500MB) into a simple text file with only a few pieces of information for each packet (such as time, source ip, destination ip, protocol, etc) so I could put them neatly in an array for another program to I have written to read.

What I wanted to do was open the trace file in ethereal and then export it to a text file. However, I believe the file is too large causing ethereal to crash when I attempt to open this file.

Another option I was thinking was split the files into pieces and then reassembling them back at the end. I tried doing this with editcap except that when I split the files, I would have to compute the exact time of the first packet in the next split file in order to appropriate set the times, which would be very troublesome (and I couldn't even find a way to use editcap to adjust the timing). Assuming I am able to split these files with the correct timing, I would have to open split files in ethereal, and export them to a text file and reassemble them with some program that I write. Is there a simplier way to do this - perhaps there is a command line function I could type to open up the 500MB file and export to a text file only the field pieces of information I need for each packet?

Or can I use tethereal to split the file into smaller pieces? I tried tethereal but I could not the duration function to work. i.e. if I wrote:
>tethereal -a duration:1 -r file -w newfile
I would get one file with a duration of larger than 1 second? I don't understand this. Could I use this to split the files into time durations, of let's say 1 second?

Thanks for the help.
Garrick