5.4. Merging capture files
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## 5.4. Merging capture files

Sometimes you need to merge several capture files into one. For example this can be useful, if you have captured simultaneously from multiple interfaces at once (e.g. using multiple instances of Wireshark).

Merging capture files can be done in three ways:

- Use the menu item "Merge" from the "File" menu, to open the merge dialog, see Section 5.4.1, “The "Merge with Capture File" dialog box”. This menu item will be disabled, until you have loaded a capture file.

- Use drag-and-drop to drop multiple files on the main window. Wireshark will try to merge the packets in chronological order from the dropped files into a newly created temporary file. If you drop only a single file, it will simply replace a (maybe) existing one.

- Use the mergecap tool, which is a command line tool to merge capture files. This tool provides the most options to merge capture files, see Section D.7, “mergecap: Merging multiple capture files into one ”.

### 5.4.1. The "Merge with Capture File" dialog box

This dialog box let you select a file to be merged into the currently loaded file.

| You will be prompted for an unsaved file first!
If your current data wasn't saved before, you will be asked to save it first, before this dialog box is shown.

Most controls of this dialog will work the same way as described in the "Open Capture File" dialog box, see Section 5.2.1, “The "Open Capture File" dialog box”.

Specific controls of this merge dialog are:

Prepend packets to existing file

  Prepend the packets from the selected file before the currently loaded packets.

Merge packets chronologically

  Merge both the packets from the selected and currently loaded file in chronological order.

Append packets to existing file

  Append the packets from the selected file after the currently loaded packets.

Table 5.3. The system specific "Merge Capture File As" dialog box

Figure 5.7. "Merge" on native Windows | Microsoft Windows This is the common Windows file open dialog - plus some Wireshark extensions.
Figure 5.8. "Merge" - new GTK version | Unix/Linux: GTK version >= 2.4 This is the common Gimp/GNOME file open dialog - plus some Wireshark extensions.
Figure 5.9. "Merge" - old GTK version | Unix/Linux: GTK version < 2.4 This is the file open dialog of former Gimp/GNOME versions - plus some Wireshark extensions.

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