beep

Beep is a simple console bell that has been created to address the issue of being limited to printf("a") when one wants a terminal beep. This program is not anything fancy, but it is designed to serve its purpose effectively. It has been created to be used within shell/perl scripts, for providing greater control than what one gets with the default terminal bell. Although some users might not find it useful, it can certainly make a difference for those who want more granularity.

As mentioned in the man page, some users experience a problem where beep dies with a complaint from ioctl(). This issue arises from how the kernel handles beep's attempt to poke at the tty, which is responsible for beeping. The kernel checks that the user is the superuser or owns the current tty before enabling beep. Consequently, root users can always make beep work, but non-root remote users would not be able to do so. Xterm or other x-session counts as remote and, as such, beep will not work from a non-privileged xterm either. Although this might appear to be a bug, it is actually a feature, as the kernel has been designed to operate in this way, to ensure security.

However, there is a solution to this issue. By default, beep is not installed with the suid bit set, but if you choose to make it suid root, it will eliminate problems with beep bailing on ioctl calls. The only reason not to use suid programs is they are a potential security risk. But since beep is such a short program, it is easy to audit it to ensure its security.

There are some new features in this release of beep, including better compression of man pages with gzip -9, adding a table of frequencies to the man page, fixing for unsigned chars in some platforms, and a fix for ioctl() errors, where beep will now do a printf("a") so that, at the very least, you get a beep. In summary, if you are looking for a simple and effective console bell that can provide more control than the default terminal bell, Beep is an excellent option.