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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 gen-
eral 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 defini-
tions.
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 par-
ticular 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 sound-
Cmd. I'm sure you can figure out what they do.
OPTIONS
-help Prints a usage message that is far more up-to-date than any-
thing in this man page.
-cfg file
Specifies the configuration file to read. If no configura-
tion 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. Multi-
ple specifications of -v cause more output, to a point.
SEE ALSO
X(7x)
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1995, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems Copyright 1995, 1998
The Open Group
See X(7x) for a full statement of rights and permissions.
AUTHOR
Erik Fortune, Silicon Graphics
XKBCOMP(1)
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