editcap -d | -D <dup window> | -w <dup time window> [ -v ] infile outfile
By default, it reads all packets from the infile and writes them to the outfile in libpcap file format.
An optional list of packet numbers can be specified on the command tail; individual packet numbers separated by whitespace and/or ranges of packet numbers can be specified as start-end, referring to all packets from start to end. By default the selected packets with those numbers will not be written to the capture file. If the -r flag is specified, the whole packet selection is reversed; in that case only the selected packets will be written to the capture file.
Editcap can also be used to remove duplicate packets. Several different options (-d, -D and -w) are used to control the packet window or relative time window to be used for duplicate comparison.
Editcap is able to detect, read and write the same capture files that are supported by Wireshark. The input file doesn't need a specific filename extension; the file format and an optional gzip compression will be automatically detected. Near the beginning of the DESCRIPTION section of wireshark(1) or <http://www.wireshark.org/docs/man-pages/wireshark.html> is a detailed description of the way Wireshark handles this, which is the same way Editcap handles this.
Editcap can write the file in several output formats. The -F flag can be used to specify the format in which to write the capture file; editcap -F provides a list of the available output formats.
This is useful in the rare case that the conversion between two file formats leaves some random bytes at the end of each packet.
The use of the option -D 0 combined with the -v option is useful in that each packet's Packet number, Len and MD5 Hash will be printed to standard out. This verbose output (specifically the MD5 hash strings) can be useful in scripts to identify duplicate packets across trace files.
The <dup window> is specifed as an integer value between 0 and 1000000 (inclusive).
NOTE: Specifying large <dup window> values with large tracefiles can result in very long processing times for editcap.
The <dup time window> is specifed as seconds[.fractional seconds].
The [.fractional seconds] component can be specified to nine (9) decimal places (billionths of a second) but most typical trace files have resolution to six (6) decimal places (millionths of a second).
NOTE: Specifying large <dup time window> values with large tracefiles can result in very long processing times for editcap.
NOTE: The -w option assumes that the packets are in chronological order. If the packets are NOT in chronological order then the -w duplication removal option may not identify some duplicates.
This option is meant to be used for fuzz-testing protocol dissectors.
This may be useful if the program that is to read the output file cannot handle packets larger than a certain size (for example, the versions of snoop in Solaris 2.5.1 and Solaris 2.6 appear to reject Ethernet packets larger than the standard Ethernet MTU, making them incapable of handling gigabit Ethernet captures if jumbo packets were used).
This feature is useful when synchronizing dumps collected on different machines where the time difference between the two machines is known or can be estimated.
Note: this merely forces the encapsulation type of the output file to be the specified type; the packet headers of the packets will not be translated from the encapsulation type of the input capture file to the specified encapsulation type (for example, it will not translate an Ethernet capture to an FDDI capture if an Ethernet capture is read and '-T fddi' is specified). If you need to remove/add headers from/to a packet, you will need od(1)/text2pcap(1).
Use of -v with the de-duplication switches of -d, -D or -w will cause all MD5 hashes to be printed whether the packet is skipped or not.
editcap -h
To shrink the capture file by truncating the packets at 64 bytes and writing it as Sun snoop file use:
editcap -s 64 -F snoop capture.pcap shortcapture.snoop
To delete packet 1000 from the capture file use:
editcap capture.pcap sans1000.pcap 1000
To limit a capture file to packets from number 200 to 750 (inclusive) use:
editcap -r capture.pcap small.pcap 200-750
To get all packets from number 1-500 (inclusive) use:
editcap -r capture.pcap first500.pcap 1-500
or
editcap capture.pcap first500.pcap 501-9999999
To exclude packets 1, 5, 10 to 20 and 30 to 40 from the new file use:
editcap capture.pcap exclude.pcap 1 5 10-20 30-40
To select just packets 1, 5, 10 to 20 and 30 to 40 for the new file use:
editcap -r capture.pcap select.pcap 1 5 10-20 30-40
To remove duplicate packets seen within the prior four frames use:
editcap -d capture.pcap dedup.pcap
To remove duplicate packets seen within the prior 100 frames use:
editcap -D 101 capture.pcap dedup.pcap
To remove duplicate packets seen equal to or less than 1/10th of a second:
editcap -w 0.1 capture.pcap dedup.pcap
To display the MD5 hash for all of the packets (and NOT generate any real output file):
editcap -v -D 0 capture.pcap /dev/null
or on Windows systems
editcap -v -D 0 capture.pcap NUL
To introduce 5% random errors in a capture file use:
editcap -E 0.05 capture.pcap capture_error.pcap
HTML versions of the Wireshark project man pages are available at: <http://www.wireshark.org/docs/man-pages>.
Original Author -------- ------ Richard Sharpe <sharpe[AT]ns.aus.com> Contributors ------------ Guy Harris <guy[AT]alum.mit.edu> Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping[AT]web.de>