For a simple demo that played a movie on a BeagleBoard, I wanted to add a simple mechanism to start the movie over again if the USER button was pressed. To read a Linux input event, it is as simple as just performing a read. The only trick to this for me, however, is that I wanted the read to timeout. This was resolved by using the Perl alarm() function can catching the signal within an eval(). I’ve uploaded a gist of my example play_movie.pl script: #!/usr/bin/perl$ENV{‘DISPLAY’} = “:0.0”;system(“xhost +”);#system(“totem –quit”);#system(“nice -n -5 totem –fullscreen /home/root/playlist.xml &”);$cmdline_start = “nice -n … Continue reading Using Perl to read Linux events