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

Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Capture file

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 This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 11:39:19 -0700
On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 04:57:50AM -0500, Beatriz Silva wrote:

> But I could not understand the data they contain (I openned them in a
> normal text editor - kwrite)

As Richard Urwin noted, they're not text, so a text file cannot read
them.

> ...  In what type of program shoul I open them ?

Ethereal, Ksnuffle, tcpdump, etc..  Ethereal's capture files are in
standard tcpdump format, so any program that can read that should be
able to read them.

> I runned the Ethereal again and the first file changed its name. Now I have:
> 
> etherXXXX1NzDLX
> etherXXXXG21vKA
> etherXXXXvVHyuE
> etherXXXXzV301P
> 
> Do you understand what this numbers and letters after the XXXX mean ? 

The names are constructed by the "mkstemp()" routine on your OS - or, if
your OS doesn't have "mkstemp()", by the glib "mkstemp()" code that
comes with Ethereal - by a process that attempts to arrange that a
temporary file (which is what those files are) has a name that's
different from the name of other temporary files with the same prefix.

Typically, that part of the name will be constructed from the process ID
of the process running Ethereal (or whatever application is using
"mkstemp()").

In other words, they don't mean anything.