Comment # 24
on bug 8279
from Guy Harris
(In reply to comment #23)
> Well, if you do not like "Wireshark as hex editor" than is exactly the same
> as "This never will be Wireshark functionality"? If something is not needed
> by you may be wish by a lot of people (for example: me). You may do not use
> it. But is not comfortable to you open some files as text/binary in
> Wireshark?
No, it's not. There are *plenty* of text editors, and *plenty* of hex editors,
out there, so people who need that functionality can already get it.
> You ask about PNG, JPG, etc support. If I have some free time I will update
> support for them (full support of: PNG, JPG, DBUS...),
I'd rather have somebody update Wireshark so that, for analyzing static file
formats, it can run an arbitrary analyzer program, so that if some other
program does a better job, it can be used.
D-Bus is a *VERY* different thing here. It's a message protocol, not a data
file format.
> so Wireshark will be better than those (old) programs.
I'd rather encourage the creation of new programs, so that, for example,
somebody who doesn't care about network protocols doesn't have to install a
packet analyzer to look at a JPEG file.
> Also I like one protocol analyzer than three/ten...
I don't consider static file formats to be protocols.
> > Wireshark is a free packet sniffer computer application. It is used for network
> > troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development,
> > and education.
>
> "Education, Analysis, Software and Communications Protocol Development"
> Not only network protocols, so I will be interesting in this area.
Yes, that's why I consider D-Bus OK.
> By the way: did you try open text file and binary file with Wireshark?
> Please do that.
Why on earth should I try opening an arbitrary text file or binary file with a
protocol analyzer? I wouldn't try opening a capture file with a word
processor, or opening a spreadsheet with a PDF viewer, or... unless I'm trying
to make sure those programs don't *crash*, or give a confusing error message,
if I do so.
If I try it with the current version of Wireshark, it does exactly what it
should. If the text file looks like one of the text-format capture records
that Wireshark supports, it'll show the packets, otherwise it'll inform you
that the file is not in a format that Wireshark understands. The same applies
to binary files and various capture file formats.
And I already *have* a tool to read text files; it works *very* well. It's
called "microEmacs". My machine has several other tools on it for reading text
files, with names such as "ed", "ex"/"vi", "GNU Emacs", "TextEdit", and it has
some other ones available for it, with names such as "BBEdit". I also have
several virtual machines, with various OSes, with text editors such as some of
the aforementioned, as well as "Notepad", "Wordpad", "Kate", "gedit", etc..
As for opening arbitrary binary files:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_hex_editors
Rather a lot listed there, with support for several platforms ("Linux" probably
mostly means "arbitrary UN*X", in most cases, for the non-GUI versions, and
"arbitrary UN*X + X11", in most cases, for the GUI ones), and a number of them
are free software. (And there's also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors
too.)