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 $c 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.

       -version
               Prints the program version and exits.

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