I like to see my sound volume in my xmobar. Usually I change the volume using keyboard mappings that I defined in my xmonad.hs. These bindings call a simple shell script that changes the volume using amixer. The script then gets the current volume level from amixer and uses echo to stuff it into a named pipe. xmobar then reads the value using PipeReader. This works fine if I change the volume using the xmonad keyboard binding, but not if I change the volume another way, such as with alsamixer. Then the volume shown in my status bar is inaccurate. I could of course simply set up xmobar to periodically read the volume with amixer at, say, every .1 second or 1 second or whatever. What I'm wondering is if there is any way to update the volume without periodically firing up amixer. I haven't even been able to figure out if the current alsa volume is available anywhere in the /proc or /sys directories. There must be some way to do this--for example, if I run alsamixer and change the volume from outside alsamixer, the bars in alsamixer instantly update--but could this easily be done with a shell script too? Thanks for any help! Omari