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. Something like this might make a suitable
replacement for xev; I'm not signing up, mind you, but it's an interest-
ing 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 be-
gins 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 $(LIB-
DIR)/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 $DIS-
PLAY.
-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.
SEE ALSO
xev(1), xkbwatch(1), X(7).
AUTHOR
Erik Fortune, Silicon Graphics
X Version 11 xkbevd 1.1.5 XKBEVD(1)
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