I might be missing something but the volume control for OpenIndiana is a bit lackluster in display department compared to FreeBSD’s. In FreeBSD, whenever I do a volume change I get to see the values; before and after – but not in OpenIndiana; its default shell-based mixer quite sucks and doesn’t give enough feedback whenever I change volume.

There’s a good reason I keep bash as my main shell – I can script in POSIX sh and keep the sane shell at the same time (as opposed to using actual POSIX sh). So here’s the function I recently created; when given no parameter will display current volume and when given one parameter will change the volume and display how the change goes.

vol() {
getvol() { audioctl show-control volume | awk ‘/^volume/ { print $2 }’; }
printf “%s: ” “Volume”
if [ -n “$1” ]; then
printf “%s => ” “$(getvol)”
audioctl set-control volume “$1”
fi
printf “%sn” “$(getvol)”
}

It should be pretty much POSIX but remember that it will only work in Solaris Express 11 (probably) and OpenIndiana (tested with oi_148).