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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Console Window option moved?

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:29:20 -0800
On Dec 10, 2011, at 4:11 PM, Akos Vandra wrote:

> As far as I know, I can use g_print for printing debug info from
> dumpcap code... isn't that right?

The documentation for g_print says

	Outputs a formatted message via the print handler. The default print handler simply outputs the message to stdout.

When Wireshark and TShark run dumpcap, the standard output and standard error might be redirected to a pipe to Wireshark/TShark, so there's no guarantee that, if you're debugging dumpcap when run from Wireshark, that you will be able to see its standard output or error - it might be swallowed up by Wireshark or TShark, which won't be expecting debugging output of that sort.

I.e., if any documentation said you could use a console window in Wireshark to debug dumpcap, the documentation is wrong and needs to be fixed - you can't.

If the problems you're trying to debug don't show up when running dumpcap directly, but only show up when running dumpcap from Wireshark or TShark, if you want to debug it with debugging printouts, I'd suggest using fopen() to open a log file and use fprintf() to write to the log file.