Since this is for your System Programming course, I won't give you the exact answer here, but I can definately give you enough to help

"..teach a man to fish.."

cjf, myself, and others discussed this briefly on the CB soon after it was posted, and I gave up a few ideas on how to solve this. First a few key questions have to be asked:

1. Will you have access to create character devices on the target machine?
2. Will you be able to rebuild a kernel or reboot the kernel on the target machine?
3. Can you run a daemon on the user machine, global to all processes?
4. Are you limited to using pure perl? Or can you use C also?

With this, you could begin to construct several plans of attack:

• Write a kernel module (does not require a reboot, but requires sufficient access to load it into userspace) which will log all calls through the kernel keyboard driver to a file via normal kernel printk() mechanisms.
• Create a character device in /dev that you can peek from and write to a file (requires root access to create devices)
• Set up a userspace daemon that polls for input, a 'shim' between keyboard driver and input application.
• Work with Inline::C and integrate it with your perl code

Some other modules you may be able to use at your disposal are:

• Net::Daemon to create your daemon process in userspace.
• IPC::open3 to allow you to open a process for for reading/writing/error reporting
• Standard pipe() function for opening and dealing with your system calls..
• The source to xev, the X Event Interface could give you some ideas also

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.