MAN page from Old RedHat 5.X kbd-0.94-6.i386.rpm

SHOWKEY

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 1 Sep 1993
Index

NAME

showkey - examine the scan codes and keycodes sent by the keyboard

SYNOPSIS

showkey[-hsk --help --scancodes --keycodes]

DESCRIPTION

showkeyprints to standard output either the scan codes or the keycode of eachkey pressed. The program runs until 10 seconds has elapsed since thelast key press or release event, or until it receives a suitable signal,like SIGTERM, from another process.

showkeyhas two modes of operation, scancode and keycode dumping, selected by acommand line option (see below). When in scancode dump mode, it printsin hexadecimal format each byte received from the keyboard to thestandard output. A new line is printed when an interval of about 0.1seconds occurs between the bytes received, or when the internal receivebuffer fills up. This can be used to determine roughly, what bytesequences the keyboard sends at once on a given key press. The scan codedumping mode is primarily intended for debugging the keyboard driver orother low level interfaces. As such it shouldn't be of much interest tothe regular end-user.

When in the default keycode dump mode,showkeyprints to the standard output the keycode number or each key pressed orreleased. The kind of the event, press or release, is also reported.Keycodes are numbers assigned by the kernel to each individual physicalkey. Every key has always only one associated keycode number, whetherthe keyboard sends single or multiple scan codes when pressing it. Usingshowkeyin this mode, you can find out what numbers to use in your personalizedkeymap files.

OPTIONS

-h --help: showkeyprints to the standard error output its version number, a compileoption and a short usage message, then exits.
-s --scancodes: Startsshowkeyin scan code dump mode.
-k --keycodes: Startsshowkeyin keycode dump mode. This is the default, when no command line optionsare present.

BUGS

A kernel bug (still present in version 0.99pl14m) causes keyreleases to be reported as key presses (when in keycode dump mode).

This document was created byman2html,using the manual pages.