Running Wireshark from a command line

In this section, we'll take a look at how to run Wireshark from a command line and explore some of the command-line options and how you might use them. The first thing I want to do is open up a Command Prompt, and then we'll browse where Wireshark is. Unless you have Wireshark in your system variable, you won't be able to simply type wireshark and have that function.

So what we'll have to do is go to its location. In my system, it's back in program files and in the wiresharkdirectory. And if we type dir, we'll see Wireshark.exe, as well as some of the other tools that we'll talk about later, such as tshark:

What we'll do is run Wireshark.exe; then, if you press Enter, it will open up Wireshark, just like if you were to click on the icon. If you type Wireshark.exe -h, it will provide the output of all the variables and arguments that Wireshark has available to it:

If we scroll up, we'll see the version of Wireshark we're running and a dump of all the variables...