KDED5(8)

💖 kded5 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because we're talking about kded5 — the KDE daemon, aka the girl who triggers Sycoca database updates whenever they're needed. she's the manual page kded5(8), she lives in section 8, and she is lowkey running your whole desktop behind your back. periodt.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

kded5 [--check]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. she's not complicated, she's just busy. 🦋

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so kded5 is literally the group-chat admin of processes — she consolidates several small services in one process. and when we say services, we mostly mean D-Bus services provided by KDED modules. but that's not all she does, no ma'am:

• she manages sycoca — that's the binary cache of servicetypes, MIME types and services used by KService — whenever it needs managing ✨
• she manages KConfig update scripts whenever those need managing 💅

the sycoca situation: she monitors the directories containing .desktop files. when a file gets added or removed, she waits 5 seconds (in case it's a whole series of updates, because she's not about to be dramatic about one tiny change), and then she launches kbuildsycoca5 to update the sycoca. iconic behaviour honestly.

the KConfig situation: she checks newly-installed update files — that's the *.upd files, the ones used to update configuration files of users when the configuration file formats change — and then she runs the KConfig update utility to perform the updates. she ate and left no crumbs.

and bestie, both of those tasks also run when kded5 is started, so your user configuration is always up to date. no stale configs in this house 🚫

real talk though: you do not normally need to run kded5 directly. Plasma desktop sessions run it automatically, and it's also started on demand when an application attempts to use a D-Bus interface provided by it or by one of its modules. she shows up when she's needed. main character energy, fr fr.

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• --check — check the sycoca database, update it if necessary, and then exit. that's the whole job. in and out. no notes. 🎀

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🎀 CONFIGURATION 🎀

kded5 can be configured with the kded5rc ini-style configuration file. on UNIX® systems, you'll find it at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kded5rc — and if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set, it defaults to ~/.config/kded5rc. iykyk. 🌈

configuration file entries are read on-demand, so you can change things while kded5 is running, bestie. BUT — and this is the plot twist — all the current configuration options only really affect the startup behaviour of kded5. so don't come for her mid-run expecting a whole personality change. 💀

⭐ the [General] section ⭐

it has the following options:

• CheckSycoca — whether to update sycoca at startup (default: true).
• CheckUpdates — whether to perform outstanding KConfig updates at startup (default: true).
• CheckFileStamps — whether to check file timestamps when performing the initial sycoca update (default: true). see the documentation for kbuildsycoca5 for more details.
• DelayedCheck — whether to delay the initial sycoca update until about a minute after starting (default: false).

🦋 the [Module-name] sections 🦋

each module also has its own [Module-name] section in kded5rc, where name is the name of the module's desktop file without the .desktop extension.

this section contains an autoload option that specifies whether the module should be automatically loaded when kded5 is started (default: false).

fun fact bestie: this setting can also be changed via kded5's D-Bus interface. slay.

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• kbuildsycoca5(8)
• kdeinit5(8)

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😭 BUGS 😭

please use KDE's bugtracker[1] to report bugs. be nice about it, she's trying her best 🫶

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🌸 AUTHORS 🌸

• David Faure <faure@kde.org> — Maintainer
• Waldo Bastian <bastian@kde.org> — Original author

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🍓 NOTES 🍓

1. KDE's bugtracker — https://bugs.kde.org

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this one is from KDE Frameworks, version Frameworks 5.0, dated 2014-03-22. vintage but still serving. go forth and let the daemon do her thing, you don't gotta run her yourself. ✨🦋🎀