Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] automated use.

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 02:53:17 -0800
Mathew Boon wrote:

I have a few thousand Kismet .dump files that I'd like to process with ethereal.

The process that I'd like to automate is opening a .dump file, then exporting it as a plain text file. I need to do this for a few thousand files and possibly upto 10,000 in total.

I can't see a way of automating this within ethereal,

You're looking in the wrong place. Try adding "t" to "ethereal" and looking there. :-)

I.e., Ethereal doesn't support automation, and, even if it did, Tethereal can, with the help of a sufficiently-powerful command language or scripting language, do the job faster.

For example, if you have a Bourne-compatible shell (all UN*Xes have them, and they're available for Windows with, for example, Cygwin), and you have all the .dump files in a single directory, you could do

	cd {that directory}
	for i in *.dump
	do
		j=`basename $i .dump`
		tethereal -V -r $j.dump >$j.txt
	done

to generate, from all the .dump files, .txt files with a detailed dissection of the packets in the .dump file. (Leave the "-V" out to get just a summary of the packets. Leave the ".txt" off if you're a hard-core UN*X user and think text files don't need a suffix. :-))