User Guide

Working with captured packets
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These ignore functions are available from the "Edit" menu, and the "Ignore packet (toggle)" function is
also available from the pop-up menu of the "Packet List" pane.
6.12. Time display formats and time references
While packets are captured, each packet is timestamped. These timestamps will be saved to the capture
file, so they will be available for later analysis.
A detailed description of timestamps, timezones and alike can be found at: Section 7.4, “Time Stamps”.
The timestamp presentation format and the precision in the packet list can be chosen using the View menu,
see Figure 3.5, “The "View" Menu”.
The available presentation formats are:
• Date and Time of Day: 1970-01-01 01:02:03.123456 The absolute date and time of the day when the
packet was captured.
• Time of Day: 01:02:03.123456 The absolute time of the day when the packet was captured.
• Seconds Since Beginning of Capture: 123.123456 The time relative to the start of the capture file or
the first "Time Reference" before this packet (see Section 6.12.1, “Packet time referencing”).
• Seconds Since Previous Captured Packet: 1.123456 The time relative to the previous captured packet.
• Seconds Since Previous Displayed Packet: 1.123456 The time relative to the previous displayed
packet.
• Seconds Since Epoch (1970-01-01): 1234567890.123456 The time relative to epoch (midnight UTC
of January 1, 1970).
The available precisions (aka. the number of displayed decimal places) are:
• Automatic The timestamp precision of the loaded capture file format will be used (the default).
• Seconds, Deciseconds, Centiseconds, Milliseconds, Microseconds or Nanoseconds The timestamp
precision will be forced to the given setting. If the actually available precision is smaller, zeros will be
appended. If the precision is larger, the remaining decimal places will be cut off.
Precision example: If you have a timestamp and it's displayed using, "Seconds Since Previous Packet", :
the value might be 1.123456. This will be displayed using the "Automatic" setting for libpcap files (which
is microseconds). If you use Seconds it would show simply 1 and if you use Nanoseconds it shows
1.123456000.
6.12.1. Packet time referencing
The user can set time references to packets. A time reference is the starting point for all subsequent packet
time calculations. It will be useful, if you want to see the time values relative to a special packet, e.g. the
start of a new request. It's possible to set multiple time references in the capture file.
Warning!
The time references will not be saved permanently and will be lost when you close the capture
file.