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Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] sorting on packet number and on time gives different resul

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 02:22:22 -0700
Ariel Burbaickij wrote:
If I correctly understood your question:
yes, I do change sort order of packet display
by using different sorting keys like timestamp
or number. Use of word filter in this sentence from me:
"...when I filter on packets' number and then on time..."
is misleading what is meant is sorting.

Yes - "filter" should be used for display filters, not for sorting, as many of us are used to interpret it as referring to display filters.

So what happened was (translating):

Hello all,
following for me somehow unexpected result:
when I sort on packets' number and then on time
results are different and sorting on time produces
not ordered set of packets' numbers but they are
mixed like in e.g. 1, 2, 7, 8, 4,3 etc.

I'm not sure our packet sorting algorithms are stable, so if two packets have the same time stamp, sorting by the time stamp might not preserve the order they had before that sort.

In addition, as per my earlier mail:

Packet capture mechanisms do not necessarily guarantee that the N+1st
packet delivered to libpcap has a time stamp >= that of the Nth packet
delivered to libpcap - I'd argue that not making such a guarantee
(assuming nobody explicitly moves the system clock backwards; if that
happens, all bets are off) is a bug, but I think some versions of
Linux, for example, are buggy in that sense.

even if all packets have different time stamps, if M > N, packet M might not have a larger time stamp than packet N, so sorting by time stamp could put the packets in a different order than sorting by packet number.