DCOP which stands for Desktop COmmunication Protocol is a light-weight interprocess communication system that allows programs and users to pass messages with and remotely control applications. KDE applications and the KDE libraries makes heavy use of DCOP and most of the KDE applications can be controlled by scripts via the DCOP mechanism.

In modern KDE systems, every KDE application supports a basic set of DCOP interfaces, even if the programmer of the application did not explicitly code in such support. For instance every application automatically supports the "quit" command, which when called closes the application.

There is a command line tool which is also called "dcop" which can be used for communication with the applications from the shell. "kdcop" is a GUI tool to explore the interfaces of an application.

For example, the kicker KDE application wasn't designed to be invisible to the user while running. This turns out to be possible regardless however, using the following DCOP command, issued at the command line:

 dcop kicker qt/Panel hide

D-BUS a message bus system standardized by freedesktop.org was heavily influenced by the DCOP system.

External links

• DCOP overview
• Tutorial for creating a DCOP Interface