why it was not capturing exact bytes given in tcpdump -s

[Latha G <lathajee () gmail com>]

Hi all,
I have one doubt on tcpdump's -s option.
I had given  "tcpdump -c 1 -s 40 > file",  after that i checked the file
size using "ls -l file",
what i got the file size is some 83 bytes. It was varying from time to time
i executed the tcpdump, some times the file size is 232 bytes, anyway i am
getting the captured bytes to be other than the given snaplen bytes.
The -s option is to capture snaplen bytes of data . Then why it was not
capturing exactly the bytes given?

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Thaks & Regards,
Latha.
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