Today I was sitting in the chair watching a film playing on my Mac Pro. After much getting up and sitting back down to turn the light off, tilt the screen, etc. I found that the sound was too quiet, and I was darned if I was going to get up again!
I had my MacBook sitting on my lap, and was sure I could change the volume from that.
After some searching, I found some magic AppleScript to do the job for me! After some remembering, I managed to execute that AppleScript on the command line. Here’s what I did:
$ osascript -e "get volume settings"
output volume:0, input volume:50, alert volume:100, output muted:true
$ osascript -e "set volume output volume 50"
The first command showed me what the current settings were, and the second command allowed me to change the volume to 50%.