Is there any command to check the PulseAudio sinks volume. Means I want display PulseAudio volume of particular sinks in %
i.e. 50%
I already set the volume using pactl set-sinks-volume 1 50% command. But now i want to check is it 50% or not.
So how can i do this?
You can use pactl list sinks to get info on the current state of your sinks. This returns a lot of information, including the volume. So, to get only the volume of sink 1, you can use:
pactl list sinks | perl -000ne 'if(/#1/){/(Volume:.*)/; print "$1
"}'
This will return something like:
Volume: 0: 50% 1: 50%
The above perl command will print the details of sink 1. To use a different sink, change the #1 to another number, for example #0.
I am not sure what the two 50% mean, I assume they are the left and right speaker volumes. So, in order to check if they are above or below a specific value, (assuming that the balance is set to "center", that both left and right volumes are identical so only one needs to be checked), you can do:
pactl list sinks | perl -000lne 'if(/#1/){/Volume:.*?(d+)%/; $1 >= 50 ? (print "y
") : (print "n
")}'
The above will print a y if the volume is greater than or equal to 50 and an n otherwise. This is all getting a bit complex though, so I would simplify by creating a script:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
## The sink we are interested in should be given as the
## 1st argument to the script.
die("Need a sink number as the first argument
") if @ARGV < 1;
my $sink=$ARGV[0];
## If the script has been run with a second argument,
## that argument will be the volume threshold we are checking
my $volume_limit=$ARGV[1]||undef;
## Run the pactl command and save the output in
## ther filehandle $fh
open(my $fh, '-|', 'pactl list sinks');
## Set the record separator to consecutive newlines (same as -000)
## this means we read the info for each sink as a single "line".
$/="
";
## Go through the pactl output
while (<$fh>) {
## If this is the sink we are interested in
if (/#$sink/) {
## Extract the current colume of this sink
/Volume:.*?(d+)%/;
my $volume=$1;
## If the script has been run with a second argument,
## check whether the volume is above or below that
if ($volume_limit) {
## If the volume os greater than or equal to the
## value passed, print "y"
if ($volume >= $volume_limit) {
print "y
";
exit 0;
}
else {
print "n
";
exit 1;
}
}
## Else, if the script has been run with just one argument,
## print the current volume.
else {
print "$volume%
";
}
}
}
Save the script above as check_volume.pl in a directory in your $PATH (for example, /usr/local/bin), make it executable, chmod +x check_volume.pl and then run it giving the sink you are interested as the first argument:
$ check_volume.pl 1
50%
To check whether the volume is above a given threshold, give the threshold as a second argument:
$ check_volume.pl 1 50
y
$ check_volume.pl 1 70
n
Note that this assumes your system language is English. If it isn't run the script with a changed locale:
LC_ALL=C check_volume.pl 1 50
