[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Joe Elliott wrote:

> 	My pipe example with tcpdump does not work with tethereal as the -r
> switch to read a file does not handle STDIN. It works fine with tcpdump.
>
> Can the developers put the '-r -' functionality in?

Not very conveniently.  Tcpdump reads fewer types of capture files than 
does Tethereal; Tethereal's capture-file-reading library (the same one 
as Ethereal) determines the file type (and some other characteristics of 
the file) by trying to read the file multiple times.  That's done by 
seeking back to the beginning of the file and reading; that doesn't work 
on pipes.

At some point the Ethereal/Tethereal library might do its own buffering, 
rather than using the "standard I/O library" routines, and might do its 
own uncompression, rather than using libz (libz doesn't, as far as I 
know, provide enough access to the decompresser's internal state to 
allow fast random access in compressed data streams).  When that's done, 
the library will probably also support rewinding to the beginning of a 
pipe *IF* only one bufferful of data has been read (as there's no 
seeking to be done, just going back to the beginning of the buffer).

There's no schedule for doing that; it would depend on the free time 
available to developers (which is the case for just about every feature 
the user base might want).