Man1 - dbus-monitor.1

dbus-monitor - debug probe to print message bus messages

dbus-monitor [–system | –session | –address ADDRESS/] [–profile | –monitor | –pcap | –binary] [/watch /expressions/]

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 text 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.

dbus-monitor also has two binary output modes. The binary mode, selected by –binary, outputs the entire binary message stream (without the initial authentication handshake). The PCAP mode, selected by –pcap, adds a PCAP file header to the beginning of the output, and prepends a PCAP message header to each message; this produces a binary file that can be read by, for instance, Wireshark.

If no mode 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.

–system

Monitor the system message bus.

–session

Monitor the session message bus. (This is the default.)

–address ADDRESS

Monitor an arbitrary message bus given at ADDRESS.

–profile

Use the profiling output format.

–monitor

Use the monitoring output format. (This is the default.)

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"

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

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