ANNOUNCEMENT: Live Wireshark University & Allegro Packets online APAC Wireshark Training Session
July 17th, 2024 | 10:00am-11:55am SGT (UTC+8) | Online

Ethereal-dev: [ethereal-dev] What should Ethereal do for command-line option errors?

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 23:18:59 -0800
If it's run with a bad command-line option, e.g. an invalid one ("-z"),
or one that's supposed to have an argument ("-m") but isn't given one,
or one that's supported only if Ethereal is built with "libpcap" ("-k"),
should it pop up a window, or should it just print a message and exit?

The latter might make more sense if it's run from a command line;
however, somebody might, say, have a menu item, or panel item, or
desktop icon, to run it, and might have specified an invalid command
line for it, in which case

	1) there might not be a standard output to which to write it, or
	   the standard output might not go to some sensible place (it
	   might go to a text-mode console that is hidden while you're
	   in X, or might go to a console window that you might not be
	   watching);

	2) if no window pops up, the user might have no clue what
	   happened.

(I'm curious what Microsoft Network Monitor - which also takes
command-line arguments - does.  I'll have to give that a try.)