How can I know which of the /dev/input/eventX (X=0..7) have the Linux input stream?

Question

I am trying to capture linux keyboard/mouse input, and I am reading events from like /dev/input/event2. But it seems the input are sometimes directed to /dev/

Answer 1

I know it's a little late to reply but I hope this is helpful for friends.

“mice” contains mouse input data, but to find the file related to the keyboards we need to check the files in folder “by-path”, keyboards file names end with “event-kbd”. We need to find the links to the keyboards, and then we can find the keyboards event file. The following commands can do this automatically for us:

kbdEvents=($(ls /dev/input/by-path | grep "event-kbd"))     
for forCounter in "${kbdEvents[@]}"
do
    eventFile=$(readlink --canonicalize "/dev/input/by-path/${forCounter}")     
    # do anything ...
done

This code is part of the code for the break time on my personal website : mazKnez.com

Answer 2

Using sudo evtest is very helpful. It will list all your input devices by name and corresponding event number. Then you can enter device event number of your interest and monitor its events.

Answer 3

To find out, go to /dev/input/by-id or /dev/input/by-path and do a ls -l to find out which symlink points to which event<*>.

Also, I thought it would be helpful for all those who come across this page to find this helpful link to some code which captures keyboard events.

Answer 4

Just stumbled across this -- rather late in the day.

You can find out the names and other attributes of different devices using:

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

Answer 5

Run this in Terminal, it will work just fine:

cat /proc/bus/input/devices | awk '/keyboard/{for(a=0;a>=0;a++){getline;{if(/kbd/==1){ print 
$NF;exit 0;}}}}'

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