https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5516
--- Comment #4 from Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 2010-12-24 01:03:40 PST ---
The reason why -i currently requires *pcap, even if you hand it a named pipe
name or "-", is that the first thing it tries with the argument to -i is to
hand it to pcap_open_live(), pcap_open(), or pcap_create() and pcap_activate()
- i.e., it tries to open it as a networking device. Only if that fails does it
try opening it as a file or named pipe.
The reason for this is that, in general, there's no way to distinguish between
the name of a named pipe and the name of a network capture device. However:
1) "-" is unlikely to be the name of a network capture device on any OS I
know of, so for "-" we might as well skip the "try to open it as a capture
device" step
and
2) we could, conceivably, skip the "try to open it as a capture device"
step if we don't have *pcap.
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