LIRC daemon - decodes infrared signals and provides them on a Unix domain socket.

lircd 0.7.1pre2 [options] [config-file]

The main task of lircd is to decode the infrared signals and provide an uniform interface for client applications. Clients can connect to lircd through a Unix domain socket which is located in /dev/lircd. Using this socket they will get the infrared codes received by lircd and they can send commands to lircd.

-h --help

display this message

-v --version

display version

-n --nodaemon

don't fork to background

-p --permission=mode

file permissions for /dev/lircd

-H --driver=driver

use given driver

-d --device=device

read from given device

-l --listen[=port]

listen for network connections on port

-c --connect=host[:port]

connect to remote lircd server

-o --output=socket

output socket filename

-P --pidfile=file

daemon pid file

-L --logfile=file

daemon log file -D[debug_level] --debug[=debug_level]

The --permission option gives the file permission of /dev/lircd if it has to be created in octal representation. Read the documentation for chmod for further details. If no --permission option is given when the socket is initially created the default is to give all users read and write permissions (0666 in octal representation). If /dev/lircd already exists this option has no effect.

With the --device option you can select the character device which lircd should read from. The default currently is /dev/lirc but it probably will change in future.

With the --listen option you can let lircd listen for network connections on the given port. The default port is 8765. No security checks are currently implemented.

The --connect option allows you to connect to other lircd servers that provide a network socket at the given host and port number. The number of such connections is currently limited to 100.

With the --output option you can select Unix domain socket, which lircd will write remote key codes to. The default currently is /dev/lircd.

With the --pidfile option you can select the lircd daemon pid file. The default currently is /var/run/lircd.pid.

With the --logfile option you can select the lircd daemon log file. The default currently is /var/log/lircd. Note that this option will only be available if you compiled lircd without syslog support.

The config file for lircd is located in /etc/lircd.conf. lircd has its own log file in /var/log/lircd (beginning with LIRC version 0.6.1 you can configure lircd to use syslogd for log messages; then it depends on your system configuration where log messages will show up). You can make lircd reread its config file and reopen its log file by sending the HUP signal to the program. That way you can rotate old log files.

lircd and lircmd are daemons. You should start them in some init script depending on your system. There are some example scripts for different distributions in the contrib directory. lircmd has to be started after lircd as it connects to the socket lircd provides.

If you start lircd or lircmd from your shell prompt you will usually get back immediately to the prompt. Often people think that the program has died. But this is not an error. lircd and lircmd are daemons. Daemons always run in background.

The documentation for lirc is maintained as html pages. They are located under html/ in the documentation directory.