Re: [Ethereal-users] Ethereal summary format

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 04, 2002 at 06:41:29PM -0600, George Sanderson wrote:
> 1) Place a one line header at the beginning of the print output that
> provides the program name, version, output format,

"Output format" in what sense?  A list of the columns being displayed,
e.g. column headings?

> and the date time of the capture.

The time that the capture started isn't available in all capture file
formats - including Ethereal's native format, libpcap (inventing our own
format and using that as the default means that a bunch of tools that
can be used for processing Ethereal captures would no longer be usable;
a future libpcap format might include a start time).

>    This could be used to differentiate future changes in the output format
>    and provide a time reference if the time output only is in seconds.

If you want a time reference, don't make the time output just seconds -
change the "Time" column to a different format, such as "Absolute time"
or "Absolute date and time", or use the command-line flag "-t a" or "-t ad"
to make the default (command-line specified) format be absolute time or
absolute date and time.