Change System Volume from Command Line on Mac OS
Oftentimes the awesome GUI applications we love are simply gloss over a command line functionality. While I do love a visual app, it's always good to know how to do things from command line, if only for the sake of automation. I've covered loads of command line secrets, most notably Mac Camera Access, so I wanted to figure out if I could control volume from command line.
Change Mac System Volume
The secret to changing Mac system volume from command line is through osascript:
# Max volume
sudo osascript -e "set Volume 10"
# Mute
sudo osascript -e "set Volume 0"
# 50% volume
sudo osascript -e "set Volume 5"
Values range from 0 (muted) to 10 (maximum volume). Note that you don't get to see a nice volume change indicator -- the volume simply changes without any feedback.
![39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla]()
In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...
![5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs. Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers. Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...
![MooTools FontChecker Plugin]()
There's a very interesting piece of code on Google Code called FontAvailable which does a jQuery-based JavaScript check on a string to check whether or not your system has a specific font based upon its output width. I've ported this functionality to MooTools.
The MooTools...
![MooTools Fun with Fx.Shake]()
Adding movement to your website is a great way to attract attention to specific elements that you want users to notice. Of course you could use Flash or an animated GIF to achieve the movement effect but graphics can be difficult to maintain. Enter...
Thank you for this tip. Are you sure that the maximum value is 10? On my Mac with High Sierra, the maximum value get on 7. The 8, 9, 10 also change the value to maximum. I did double check it by viewing the pop-up small window on volume indicator on menu bar.
This is how it’s done on Mojave:
The deprecated way is to specify a number between 0 and 7 for “set volume”
Is there a way to similarly look up the current volume setting (let’s say, in Mojave or Catalina)?
Options to get the current volume setting:
or