Bind keypress to shell command?

["Bob Freemer" <bob.freemer@medomics.com>]

Hi, guys,

I've searched everywhere on Google and the group for postings about this,
but can't find anything.  I'm setting up an "appliance" machine and want
to simply bind shell commands to a keypress on a numeric kepad.  One of
the functions is to control mpd for MP3 playing, amongst others.

I DO NOT use X, which precludes things like hotkeys etc.  Simply booting
an ncurses interface into one of the virtual terminals that would listen
for a keypress and then execute a shell command would do it, but I've
searched high and low for such an thing but can't find it.  I can get the
keycodes from showkey, but that's about it.  Maybe there's a way to do it
in the inittab?  Can't find anything in the documentation on that though.

I suppose coding a simple app could do it, but I didn't really want to get
into that as I'm sure others have faced this type of thing before.

Thanks much,
Bob