pacmd(1)

pacmd1

Reconfigure a pulseaudio sound server during runtime

Usage

pacmd

pacmd --help

pacmd --version

Overview

This tool can be used to introspect or reconfigure a running PulseAudio sound server during runtime. It connects to the sound server and offers a simple live shell that can be used to enter the commands also understood in the default.pa configuration scripts.

To exit the live shell, use ctrl+d. Note that the 'exit' command inside the shell will tell the PulseAudio daemon itself to shutdown!

If any arguments are passed on the command line, they will be passed into the live shell which will process the command and exit.

Options

-h | --help

Show help.

--version

Show version information.

Releases

10 releases since Debian 5.0 (Lenny); the text changed 2 times.

  1. 5.0–6.0
  2. 7
  3. 8–Arch

--help since Debian 8 (Jessie); --version since Debian 8 (Jessie); -h since Debian 8 (Jessie).

Authors

The PulseAudio Developers <pulseaudio-discuss (at) lists (dot) freedesktop (dot) org>; PulseAudio is available from http://pulseaudio.org/

From pulseaudio 17.0+r134+g77d25a1e6-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.