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dbus-monitor(1) General Commands Manual dbus-monitor(1)

NAME

dbus-monitor - debug probe to print message bus messages

SYNOPSIS

dbus-monitor [--system | --session | --address ADDRESS] [--profile | --monitor] [watch expressions]

DESCRIPTION

The dbus-monitor command is used to monitor messages going through a D-Bus message bus. See http://www.freedesktop.org/software/dbus/ for more information about the big picture.

There are two well-known message buses: the systemwide message bus (installed on many systems as the "messagebus" service) and the per-user-login-session message bus (started each time a user logs in). The --system and --session options direct dbus-monitor to monitor the system or session buses respectively. If neither is specified, dbus-monitor monitors the session bus.

dbus-monitor has two different output modes, the 'classic'-style monitoring mode and profiling mode. The profiling format is a compact format with a single line per message and microsecond-resolution timing information. The --profile and --monitor options select the profiling and monitoring output format respectively. If neither is specified, dbus-monitor uses the monitoring output format.

In order to get dbus-monitor to see the messages you are interested in, you should specify a set of watch expressions as you would expect to be passed to the dbus_bus_add_match function.

The message bus configuration may keep dbus-monitor from seeing all messages, especially if you run the monitor as a non-root user.

OPTIONS

Monitor the system message bus.
Monitor the session message bus. (This is the default.)
Monitor an arbitrary message bus given at ADDRESS.
Use the profiling output format.
Use the monitoring output format. (This is the default.)

EXAMPLE

Here is an example of using dbus-monitor to watch for the gnome typing monitor to say things


dbus-monitor "type='signal',sender='org.gnome.TypingMonitor',interface='org.gnome.TypingMonitor'"

AUTHOR

dbus-monitor was written by Philip Blundell. The profiling output mode was added by Olli Salli.

BUGS

Please send bug reports to the D-Bus mailing list or bug tracker, see http://www.freedesktop.org/software/dbus/