Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Little Problem

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 11:15:00 -0800
C7 wrote:

I'm working with tethereal and the command that i've made is this:

tethereal.exe -i 2 -f "tcp port 3128" -R http.request.method=="GET" -w capture.txt -c 20

But when i open the file, i can't read the first line:

It's not a text file. It's a binary file, in libpcap format. Don't try to read it with a text editor (and don't call it a ".txt" file, as that means that the OS would try to open it as a text file; call it ".pcap" or something such as that).

What i want is to get the Hosts, but i need that the first line must be in normal characters. If i open the capture in Ethereal and export it to Plain Text, the capture text becomes "normal".

That's what "export as plain text" means - it reads the binary capture file (which is *intended* to be binary) and saves the dissected packets to a text file.

If you want Tethereal to write out the dissected packets, *don't* use the "-w" flag - just redirect the output to a file:

tethereal -i 2 -f "tcp port 3128" -R http.request.method=="GET" -c 20 >capture.txt

although if you want the detailed dissection of the packets, you also use the "-W" flag.