xkbevd(1) - phpMan

XKBEVD(1) General Commands Manual XKBEVD(1)

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. Some-
thing 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 identi-
fier which serves as a qualifier in parentheses; empty parenthesis indicate no qualifica-
tion 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, ac-
cept, or reject. No other events are currently recognized.

An action consists of an optional keyword followed by an optional string argument. Cur-
rently, 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.