Permission to scream

Okay, I'm stupid on two accounts. 1) I should have seen that /dev/snd wasn't executable when I was poking around looking for the problem. 2) I really should have seen it wasn't executable when I had the ls output pasted back to me by a random condescending IRC person.

Should I have spotted this myself? Absolutely. Should it have been set like this to begin with? Absolutely fucking not.

Now, Blissex seemed to be under the impression that this was entirely my fault for using octal instead of addative syntax in chmod. Again, no. Prior to this all my messing with sound permissions has been with /dev/(dsp|mixer)* not /dev/snd — and snd_pcm_open has always failed for a user in the audio group. Why? Because when ALSA created those dirs it got the permissions wrong or some package modified them. I haven't touched them.

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