PCSC-SPY(1)

💅 pcsc-spy — the PC/SC spy command, bestie

okay so real talk: this is pcsc-spy, and it lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation section of the manual (that's the manual name, iykyk — section 1 🎀). It's a little spy tool for your smartcard stack and honestly it's giving main character energy. Let's get into it.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pcsc-spy [-n|--nocolor] [-d|--diffable] [-h|--help] [-v|--version]
[-t|--thread] [fifo_filename]

That's the whole vibe check right there. 💖

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So pcsc-spy displays PC/SC calls of an application. It literally watches everything your app says to the PC/SC layer and prints it out. Iconic. 👑

But — and this is important — it must be used with the libpcscspy.so.0 library. No library, no spying. That's the deal. 🤝

And to be able to spy on the PC/SC layer, the application flow has to be modified using LIBPCSCLITE_DELEGATE, so that all PC/SC calls get redirected. That's the whole trick, no cap. 🪄

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🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -d, --diffable — removes the variable parts (like handler values, for example) from the output, so you can compare two executions way more easily. Slay for diffing. 🔍
• -h, --help — displays a short help text. The classic. 🫶
• -n, --nocolor — disables the output colorization. Use this if you wanna redirect the output into a file, for example. (RIP the pretty colors, but at least your log file isn't a crime scene. 😭)
• -v, --version — prints the version of the pcsc-spy program, plus a copyright, plus a list of authors. Give the people credit fr fr. 🎀
• -t, --thread — adds a thread number before each line of the log, so you can identify which calls came from the same threads. Multi-threaded chaos, but organized. 🧵

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🧚 EXAMPLES 🧚

So we're gonna use the LIBPCSCLITE_DELEGATE environment variable to load our spying library. That's the move. ✨

Example:

sh /usr/share/doc/libpcsclite-dev/setup_spy.sh
export LIBPCSCLITE_DELEGATE=/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcscspy.so.0

LIBPCSCLITE_DELEGATE=/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcscspy.so.0 my_application

Like, that's literally it. Set the variable, run your app, watch the magic. 🌈

🔥 Starting the spy tool

pcsc-spy

Okay so if a command argument is passed, we use it instead of the default ~/pcsc-spy FIFO file. And once you do that, it's then possible to record an execution log and use pcsc-spy multiple times on the same log — yes, rewatch the whole thing, it's that good. 💅

To create the log file, just do:

mkfifo ~/pcsc-spy
cat ~/pcsc-spy > logfile

and then run your PC/SC application. Boom. Logged. 📝

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🍓 FILES 🍓

• ~/pcsc-spy — the FIFO file used by libpcscspy.so.0 to send the raw log lines. That's the whole pipeline, bestie. 🎀

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

• pcscd(8)

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

This manual page was written by Ludovic Rousseau <rousseau@free.fr>. Thank you king, we appreciate you. 🫶👑

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lowkey a reminder: this page is perl v5.42.0, dated 2024-01-01 — that's the version and date of this little doc, so now you know exactly where it came from. 💖

okay that's the whole page, go forth and spy responsibly, mwah 🧚✨🎀