Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [ethereal-dev] What should Ethereal do for command-line option errors?

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I'd suggest letting the user decide.  Invent a new switch.

If the user knew what switches the program supported, they wouldn't have
given an incorrect switch.

And if the problem is that they knew what valid command-line they
wanted, but they typoed, perhaps the flag they typoed was the new one.

> The conflict here is fundamental to the program's schizoid environment, so
> only the user can say which behavior is more useful.

The problem here is that what Ethereal's complaining about is that the
user didn't say something valid, so having the user say *on the command
line* doesn't work.  It's also inconvenient to have to say so every
time.

As long as we pop up a window, rather than just exiting, if the command
line is invalid - or if the capture file specified with "-r" can't be
opened, or if the filter expression on the command line is invalid,
or... - I'd say we should, at minimum, pop up a message box, and
possibly *also* print an error message to the standard output (part of
what prompted my question was that, if you give a bad command-line
argument, it still pops up a window, and that may distract you from
looking at the command line, if you ran it from the command line, and
tells you nothing, if you didn't).