Sometimes you need to merge several capture files into one. For example this can be useful, if you have captured simultaneously from multiple interfaces at once (e.g. using multiple instances of Ethereal).
Merging capture files can be done in three ways:
Use the menu item "Merge" from the "File" menu, to open the merge dialog, see Figure 5.3, “The "Merge with Capture File" dialog box”. This menu item will be disabled, until you have loaded a capture file.
Use drag-and-drop to drop multiple files on the main window. Ethereal will try to merge the packets in chronological order from the dropped files into a newly created temporary file. If you drop only a single file, it will simply replace a (maybe) existing one.
Use the mergecap tool, which is a command line tool to merge capture files. This tool provides the most options to merge capture files, see Section C.6, “mergecap: Merging multiple capture files into one ”.
This dialog box let you select a file to be merged into the currently loaded file.
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If your current data wasn't saved before, you will be asked to save it first, before this dialog box is shown. |
Prepend the packets from the selected file before the currently loaded packets.
Merge both the packets from the selected and currently loaded file in chronological order.
Append the packets from the selected file after the currently loaded packets.
All other controls will work the same way as in the "Open Capture File" dialog box, see Section 5.2.1, “The "Open Capture File" dialog box”.