Featured Articles

Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)
Hardening Guide for phpList
WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)
Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs
WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
previous arrow
next arrow

Finding and Killing Processes Blocking Alsa Devices

Quite often, and for whatever reason, I go to play a sound in linux and I get a "device or resource busy" error. Restarting alsasound doesn't work. Here's what does:

guttersnipe@guttersnipe ~ $ fuser -v /dev/snd/* USER PID ACCESS COMMAND /dev/snd/controlC0: guttersnipe 21993 F.... python2.5 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p: guttersnipe 21993 F.... python2.5 /dev/snd/timer: guttersnipe 21993 f.... python2.5 guttersnipe@guttersnipe ~ $ lsof -n | grep "/dev/snd" python2.5 21993 guttersnipe 78r CHR 116,2 0t0 10272 /dev/snd/timer python2.5 21993 guttersnipe 79u CHR 116,4 0t0 10476 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p python2.5 21993 guttersnipe 80u CHR 116,7 0t0 10466 /dev/snd/controlC0 guttersnipe@guttersnipe ~ $ kill 21993

Source: http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/FAQ#How_can_I_find_which_processes_are_using_Alsa_devices.3F

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

tech.michaelaltfield.net/