What is Netdude Not?

Mhm. It cannot take out the trash, clean your house or buy you tickets, but hopefully it can do pretty much anything related to tracefile editing :) But seriously, in case Netdude doesn't provide the functionality you need off-the-shelf, it should be easy to code a plugin that will do what you need in much less lines of code than writing the tool from scratch.

Netdude is not competing against ethereal. ethereal is a network protocol analyzer. It is great for inspecting traces and supports tons of protocols. It is not intended for tracefile manipulation. It does not provide the familiar tcpdump output. It doesn't provide graphical representations of the protocol content. There is some overlap in functionality, but this is for convenience only.

Netdude still has a long way to go before 1.0. One of the things where Netdude currently does lack support are large traces. Netdude currently is ideal for editing "in the small" in traces that easily fit into system memory. The next Netdude release, 0.4, will add support for handling arbitrarily large traces by keeping only parts of traces in memory at any point in time.

Another issue is the fact that at the moment, you can only set absolute values for header field values. There are situations where it would be nice to adjust them by a relative value (say, to change all IP addresses, but each of them according to the existing value). Right now, you'll have to write a plugin to do this.