Dumping Tomcat packets using tshark

Tshark (command line version of wireshark) is a wonderful tool for dumping packets and recently I used it on my Mac since I couldn't easily get Tomcat to log the HTTP packets coming in on port 8080. Having used it in the past for lots of other reasons, I felt compelled to find a generic solution to this problem where you have to rely on application level logging to determine why something works or doesn't.

Here is the command I used (lo0 is the loopback interface since I was running the client and server on my PC)

tshark -f "tcp port 8080" -i lo0 -V. Here is a very good page on tshark that I am sure I will come back to again and again to get more juice out of this tool.