'Twas brillig, and Whit Blauvelt at 10/09/10 12:26 did gyre and gimble: > On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 10:07:25AM +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote: > >> Contrary to the comment that pacmd takes no command line options, you >> can just give it commands, so there is no need for this complicated >> expect script: >> >> pacmd set-default-source alsa_input.usb-Generic_FREETALK_Everyman_0000000001-00-Everyman.analog-stereo >> >> Should work fine. > > You're right. It produces this visual noise, which doesn't look promising: > > Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information. > >>> >>> > > But it does turn out to have done the job. The man page for pacmd does say: > > This program takes no command line options. > > Evidently we're not supposed to RTFM on this one. Yeah I suspect the capabilities were added after the man page was written and no one has noticed until you've pointed it out. Documentation patches are as welcome as any other :) > Here's an example of fragility: the pacmd "exit" command doesn't follow the > standard *nix convention of "exit" exiting a shell. Instead it means what in > a *nix context shoudl be called "kill." So you use it. You discover you've > killed the daemon. Well, guess what. The daemon won't start again easily. > Trying /etc/init.d/pulseaudio start or just pulseaudio& - neither gets it > started. Neither gives a decent error message as to why it fails, either to > console or logs. You end up rebooting the system. Okay that works. The /etc/inid.d script should ONLY be used for system wide PA. We do not even provide such a script in our upstream tarballs and generally discourage using PA in system wide mode. In the default, per-user setup that we ship, PA auto-spawns, so exiting the daemon is generally not overly problematic (clients which support reconnect will do so automatically). I take your point re the "exit" command tho'. I am tempted to agree with you. I just never, ever type exit on any terminal out of habit (ctrl+D is much quicker) and thus I've never really noticed this. Patches most likely welcome for this change too. Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]
