dbus-monitor manual page.
Copyright (C) 2003 Red Hat, Inc.

dbus-monitor - debug probe to print message bus messages

dbus-monitor [--system | --session | --address ADDRESS] [--profile | --monitor] [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 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.

"--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/