Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Problems Importing TCPDUMP Output into Ethereal

[Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 11 Apr 2003, Richard Ginski wrote:

> On a Windows 2000 machine, we have been redirecting output from TCPDUMP to a text file. Unfortunately, when trying to open the files with Ethereal , we receive the error message:
> 
> "The file "filename" is not a capture file in a format Ethereal understand"
> 
> What could we be doing wrong?
> 
> We have tried Ethereal 0.9.7 and 0.9.11
> 
> Running TCPDUMP command:
> 
> tcpdump host "IP address" > text file
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help.

Ethereal isn't able to parse the text output of tcpdump.  Try 

    tcpdump -w "output_file" host "IP address"

instead.  This will generate a binary dump file that Ethereal can read.