Any other ideas?
No. Especially as it works for me, running 0.9.10 (latest CVS tarball) on Linux (old Slackware, kernel 2.2.13).
I can create a named pipe called 'testpipe', tell Ethereal to read from it with -i ./testpipe and dump a pcap-format file in the pipe, and Ethereal will happily decode it.
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Regards,
Marco.