How do I convert wireshark capture files to text files?

How can I convert wirshark captures (.cap) files to text files or some format from which I can read the file and parse its contents ?

Solution 1:

Open up Wireshark, select your .cap file, and then go to File->Export and choose the options that you want.

So, if you need to do it from the command line, use tshark.exe, as follows.

>tshark -i - < "c:\filename.cap" > "c:\output.txt

If you want to write the decoded form of packets to a file, run TShark without the -w option, and redirect its standard output to the file (do not use the -w option).

Solution 2:

The -A option of tcpdump prints each packet in human readable ASCII and happily deals with wireshark files and you can do it all from the command line:

tcpdump -A -r stackoverflow.cap > stackoverflow.txt

The output looks like:

9:22:33.664874 IP 192.168.1.11.33874 > stackoverflow.com.www: Flags [P.], seq 1117095075:1117095829, ack 3371415182, win 9648, options [nop,nop,TS val 9533909 ecr 313735664], length 754
E..&..@.@../....E;...R.PB.........%........
..y...9.GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: serverfault.com
Connection: keep-alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.70 Safari/533.4
Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie: __qca=P0-141773580-1259521886021; __utmz=81883924.1275328201.133.5.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=hudson%20build%20dir; usr=t=kXSBoIG5Jk6S&s=wGmaIuhAD0eH; __utma=81883924.2034104685.1272993451.1276186265.1276193655.189; __utmc=81883924; __utmb=81883924.6.10.1276193655
If-Modified-Since: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:17:12 GMT

Solution 3:

I use the tshark -x -r file.pcap command line when hexdump like output is good for post processing.