Ubuntu Manpage: xkbevd - XKB event daemon

NAME

       xkbevd - XKB event daemon

SYNOPSIS

       xkbevd [ options ]

DESCRIPTION

This command is very raw and is therefore only partially implemented; we present it here as a rough
prototype for developers, not as a general purpose tool for end users. Something like this might make a
suitable replacement for xev; I'm not signing up, mind you, but it's an interesting idea.

The xkbevd event daemon listens for specified XKB events and executes requested commands if they occur.
The configuration file consists of a list of event specification/action pairs and/or variable
definitions.

An event specification consists of a short XKB event name followed by a string or identifier which serves
as a qualifier in parentheses; empty parenthesis indicate no qualification and serve to specify the
default command which is applied to events which do not match any of the other specifications. The
interpretation of the qualifier depends on the type of the event: Bell events match using the name of
the bell, message events match on the contents of the message string and slow key events accept any of
press, release, accept, or reject. No other events are currently recognized.

An action consists of an optional keyword followed by an optional string argument. Currently, xkbev
recognizes the actions: none, ignore, echo, printEvent, sound, and shell. If the action is not
specified, the string is taken as the name of a sound file to be played unless it begins with an
exclamation point, in which case it is taken as a shell command.

Variable definitions in the argument string are expanded with fields from the event in question before
the argument string is passed to the action processor. The general syntax for a variable is either $cP
or $(str), where c is a single character and str is a string of arbitrary length. All parameters have
both single-character and long names.

The list of recognized parameters varies from event to event and is too long to list here right now.
This is a developer release anyway, so you can be expected to look at the source code (evargs.c is of
particular interest).

The ignore, echo, printEvent, sound,and shell actions do what you would expect commands named ignore,
echo, printEvent, sound, and shell to do, except that the sound command has only been implemented and
tested for SGI machines. It launches an external program right now, so it should be pretty easy to
adapt, especially if you like audio cues that arrive about a half-second after you expect them.

The only currently recognized variables are soundDirectory and soundCmd. I'm sure you can figure out
what they do.

OPTIONS

       -help   Prints a usage message that is far more up-to-date than anything in this man page.

       -cfg file
               Specifies  the  configuration file to read.   If no configuration file is specified, xkbevd looks
               for ~/.xkb/xkbevd.cf and $(LIBDIR)/xkb/xkbevd.cf in that order.

       -sc cmd Specifies the command used to play sounds.

       -sd directory
               Specifies a top-level directory for sound files.

       -display display
               Specifies the display to use.  If not present, xkbevd uses $DISPLAY.

       -bg     Tells xkbevd to fork itself (and run in the background).

       -synch  Forces synchronization of all X requests.  Slow.

       -v      Print more information, including debugging messages.   Multiple specifications of -v cause  more
               output, to a point.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 1995, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems Copyright 1995, 1998  The Open Group
       See X(7) for a full statement of rights and permissions.

AUTHOR