On Tue, Oct 13, 1998 at 09:08:44AM -0400, Michael C. Richardson wrote:
>   I disagree. The hex output is almost always useless because you are looking
> for a packet whose contents you may understand in ascii, but don't recognize
> in hex. With the ascii output, I can save to a file, and then grep the file.

I disagree.  If I'm developing a driver for custom Ethernet driver (and I
will be soon), I'll want to display the packets in hex to see what exactly
is going on.  ASCII is a nice addition when monitoring ASCII test packets,
but if I want to see if there are any extra bytes at the end of the packet,
for example, hex is the only reliable way (of telling if there are
unprintable characters or something like that).

I vote for both ASCII and hex.

(Hey, why not writing a netmagic file that describes simple protocols in
text form so tcpdump can be taught new protocols without hacking the
source... ;-)

  -jm