How to adjust the output of dbus-monitor?

Question

I'm building a microservices application using the GNU tools and bash and I decided to use dbus-monitor and dbus-send for IPC between services. The problem is that it's hard to make use of the messages received by dbus-monitor since it splits metadata and payload in different lines.

If I instantiate a listener with

dbus-monitor --system interface=org.foo.bar member=test \
 | while read a; do
  echo got message $a
done

and communicate to it with

dbus-send --system --type=signal / org.foo.bar.test string:"hello world"

The output comes as

got line signal time=1676042614.782238 path=; interface=org.foo.bar; member=test
got line string "hello world"

even though string "hello world" is the payload to the message, it was written in a different line.

I tried messing with IFS but no success. I also tried to change parameters to dbus-monitor, but the parameter --profile omits the payload. So I dont know how to solve this.

Answer 1

Add "type=string" as an expression to the end of the dbus-monitor command if you only want strings.