dbus-monitor - debug probe to print message bus messages

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
       https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus/

D-Bus 1.16.2                                                                                     DBUS-MONITOR(1)

Description

The dbus-monitor command is used to monitor messages going through a D-Bus message bus. See
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/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.

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'"

Name

       dbus-monitor - debug probe to print message bus messages

Options

--system
           Monitor the system message bus.

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

       --addressADDRESS
           Monitor an arbitrary message bus given at ADDRESS.

       --profile
           Use the profiling output format.

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

Synopsis

dbus-monitor [--system | --session | --address ADDRESS] [--profile | --monitor | --pcap | --binary]
                    [watchexpressions]