Question

for Linux, there is a nifty little library called xbindkeys that (surprise) binds commands of your choice to certain key combinations.

I am looking for something similar, except for a system hardware event. When I plug in my headphones to the output jack on my computer, I would like to be able to call a program. It would also be nice to be able to bind to the event when I un-plug my headphones.

Does anybody know if this is possible? Maybe through some cool Python X11 library?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Found the API for the jack abstraction layer: http://www.alsa-project.org/~tiwai/alsa-driver-api/ch06s02.html
Sadly, this only allows for polling of the device, not an event handler.

Answer 1

You probably want to use udev for this. I haven’t used libudev, but here’s something I found:

libudev – Monitoring Interface

libudev also provides a monitoring interface. The monitoring interface
will report events to the application when the status of a device
changes. This is useful for receiving notification when devices are
connected or disconnected from the system.

The actions are returned as the following strings:

• add – Device is connected to the system
• remove – Device is disconnected from the system
• change – Something about the device changed
• move – Device node was moved, renamed, or re-parented

That article goes on to show how it obtains a file descriptor via udev_monitor_get_fd, which it later monitors via select.