On May 12, 2012, at 12:43 PM, Jakub Zawadzki wrote:

> Do we really need to "capture" from pipes in dumpcap?

I believe the ability to capture from a pipe was introduced in order to handle 
capturing from sources that libpcap/WinPcap don't handle (e.g., "ssh over to 
machine XXX and run tcpdump on it, capturing to the standard output" or 
"capture from some network type that libpcap doesn't (yet) handle") - a program 
that captures from that source and writes pcap output to its standard output 
could be used as a capture source.

Ideally, that should be supported by libpcap/WinPcap, but "capture from a pipe" 
can be a useful workaround in cases where that hasn't yet been implemented.

I.e., it wasn't done to support reading from a pipeline such as one that has a 
program that reads a capture file, transforms it, and writes it to its standard 
output, it was done for use in a true capture situation (so that, for example, 
Wireshark would need to write the packets to a file for examination at 
arbitrary times in the future).
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