/dev/speaker broken in 5.x?

[Rick C. Petty]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 03:36:32PM +1000, Ian Smith wrote:
> If this is not an appropriate topic for -multimedia, can someone please
> at least suggest where it might be on topic?  Is anyone able to confirm
> (or otherwise) the behaviour demonstrated below on a 5.x or 6.x system? 

I've confirmed this behavior on a 5.4 system.  It doesn't misbehave in
6.0 or 6.1-RC1.  I haven't tried 5.5-* yet.

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 15:53:58 +1000
> From: Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au>
> To: freebsd-multimedia at freebsd.org
> Subject: /dev/speaker broken in 5.x?
> 
> This always worked fine in 4.5, and as far as I can tell from CVS, is 
> unchanged in 4-STABLE.  Since installing 5.4, I get the following always 
> repeatable symptoms when using the speaker device to play tunes, shown 
> here as root but it's just the same when run as a (wheel) user:
> 
> paqi# echo "T250L8CE-GE-C" > /dev/speaker  # works fine the 1st time ..
> paqi# fstat | grep speaker                 # but leaves speaker open ..
> root     csh         1919    4 /dev         72 crw-rw----  speaker  w
> root     fstat       1918    4 /dev         72 crw-rw----  speaker  w
> root     csh         1116    4 /dev         72 crw-rw----  speaker  w
> paqi# echo "T250L8CE-GE-C" > /dev/speaker  # no sound every 2nd time ..
> /dev/speaker: Device busy.
> paqi# fstat | grep speaker                 # but frees the device again,
> paqi# echo "T250L8CE-GE-C" > /dev/speaker  # to work again next time ..

What does the hypen do?  I can't seem to find it in the man page.

-- Rick C. Petty