Linux keyboard event capturing /dev/inputX

Question

I was trying to capture keyboard events. e.g. I want to drill down a keylogger from the scratch. After 2 hours of fighting I found the following

neel@pc1$ ls -l /dev/input/by-id
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2010-05-05 21:33 usb-Plus_More_Enterprise_LTD._USB-compliant_keyboard-event-kbd -> ../event1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2010-05-05 21:33 usb-Plus_More_Enterprise_LTD._USB-compliant_keyboard-event-mouse -> ../event2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2010-05-05 21:33 usb-Plus_More_Enterprise_LTD._USB-compliant_keyboard-mouse -> ../mouse1

But when I tried to

neel@pc1$ sudo cat /dev/input/usb-Plus_More_Enterprise_LTD._USB-compliant_keyboard-event-kbd

It yields nothing THERE WAS NO OUTPUT

after a bit more searching Now I am thinking probabbly something in Xorg blocks it.

So Any more Information ?? and atthe end of the say how can I read the input from that file ?? or is there any other way of capturing keyboard events ??

Answer 1

You are reading the wrong device. Either try all /dev/input/event* or look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for which device is used for your keyboard.