Access to mouse events

[ruru]

I would like to get hold of mouse movements and dump them to disc. I will be using more than one mouse (I plan to use these as cheap data capture devices) and some research has suggested that mouse movement data is streamed to /dev/input/mouseXXX, but I am not sure how to access this info.

sudo cat /dev/input/mouse2 doesn't show anything at all.

I have USB mice (they all work fine) and am working on Ubuntu Intrepid (AMD64).

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I would really appreciate your help!

[jeffathehutt]

I don't use Ubuntu, so this may not apply to you...

On my system the mouse events are sent to /dev/input/mice and using

sudo cat /dev/input/mice
does show data whenever I move the mouse. Maybe your system is set up in a similar way? Hope that helps a bit. :)

[ruru]

This is what I have been reading, but I don't get those results. cat /dev/input/mice (and all of the other input devices, mouseXXX, eventXXX) just gives blank output.

I can identify the correct input device by hotplugging it and seeing which files are changed.

Anyone know why /dev/input/mice would not return anything for a functioning USB mouse?