Are there any command line utilities that can capture joystick button presses?

Here's my situation: I have a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian installed on it. I also have RetroArch installed and a simple USB gamepad hooked up. Everything works fine, but I wanted to set it up so that pressing a key combination (ex L1+L2+R1+R2) would gracefully exit the emulator so that I don't have to keep a keyboard around. RetroArch's default key to gracefully exit is ESC, and I can't remap it to a key combination due to a limitation in RetroArch (I could, however, remap it to a single gamepad key). So I was wondering if there were any utilities out there that could listen to the gamepad's key presses and, when a certain combination is pressed, performs an action (sending the ESC key to the emulator). Or is there an easier way to achieve what I want and I'm just being silly? EDIT: Now that I think about it, it would also be nice if I could have a different key combination execute a bash script that starts the emulator so that I could start it without a keyboard as well.