Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Command Line Preference Changes

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Preston, Gabriel wrote:

> I was wondering if it would be possible to change the file permission
> defaults via the command line to '0644' with the '-o' flag?

Given that the "-o" flag affects only protocol preferences, and the file 
permissions aren't a protocol preference - in fact, it's not a 
preference at all - the answer is "no".

> It seems that
> sometimes ethereal/tethereal saves the capture files with a '0600' file
> permission

"Sometimes"?  That's the default behavior.

We could use 0644 and let the umask take away undesired read 
permissions, but that might not be what all users want - it's easier to 
give people read permissions afterwards than to retroactively take away 
read permission after somebody's already read a file, and capture files 
sometimes contain sensitive data.

We could also perhaps have the temporary capture files created with 0600 
and have "Save" change the permissions of the file, although again that 
might give public read permission when that's not desired.

Having Ethereal control the access rights to files gets more complicated 
on systems with ACLs (systems in the Windows NT line, including W2K (NT 
5.0), WXP (NT 5.1), and W2K3 Server (NT 5.2), and some UN*Xes).