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Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Wireshark vs. lt-wireshark

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 01:44:36 -0800
On Jan 10, 2013, at 11:56 PM, "Ewgenij Sokolovski" <ewgenijkkg@xxxxxx> wrote:

>> 	http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libtool.html#Wrapper-executables
> 
> OK, thank you. And what could be the reason for a new, built-in dissector being loaded when executing "lt-wireshark" while being ignored while executing "wireshark"?

"wireshark" the wrapper script or "wireshark" the program that gets installed when you do "make install"?  (The former is the wrapper script that runs the "lt-wireshark" executable image; the latter is an executable image with no wrapper script.)

Wireshark, on UN*X, does some tricks to determine whether it's being run from the build directory or not, in order to know whether to look for plugins in the build directory or in the installation directory.  One such trick is to check whether what it determines to be the pathname of the Wireshark executable that's running has the executable in a directory named ".libs" or not; if it does, it's assumed that you're running from the build directory, as the libtool build process sticks the lt-XXX executable in the .libs directory.  If Wireshark is being run from the build directory, it'll look for plugins in the subdirectories of the "plugins" directory, as those are the source directories for the plugins and the plugins should have been built into those directories, and doesn't add a version number to the plugin path.

However, if you run the "wireshark" wrapper script, it should run ".libs/lt-wireshark", so ".libs" should be there in either case, and the search process for plugins should be the same.