Hi,
Short summary:
trying "padsp firefox" failed, gdb discovered that the failure was in access. I'll spare you the stacktrace - the crux of it is that pathname was ==NULL, and padsp failed in the call to strcmp.
Solution:
this is the unified diff patch I used to fix it. After applying it I successfully used "padsp firefox" to play some music (using the mplayer embeddable plugin for firefox).
--- pulseaudio-0.9.5/src/utils/padsp.c 2006-08-19 00:29:26.000000000 +0300
+++ pulseaudio-0.9.5-alon/src/utils/padsp.c 2006-08-29 01:36:30.010620500 +0300
@@ -2122,7 +2122,12 @@
int access(const char *pathname, int mode) {
debug(DEBUG_LEVEL_VERBOSE, FILE": access(%s)\n", pathname);
-
+ if (pathname == NULL) {
+ // according to the man page from ubuntu the closest error condition:
+ // EFAULT pathname points outside your accessible address space
+ errno = EFAULT;
+ return -1;
+ }
if (strcmp(pathname, "/dev/dsp") != 0 &&
strcmp(pathname, "/dev/adsp") != 0 &&
strcmp(pathname, "/dev/sndstat") != 0 &&
