Tribblix: manual page: dbus-monitor.1

DBUS-MONITOR(1) User Commands DBUS-MONITOR(1)

NAME

dbus-monitor - debug probe to print message bus messages

SYNOPSIS

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 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.

OPTIONS

--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.)

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/

D-Bus 1.12.28 01/10/2025 DBUS-MONITOR(1)