A cross-platform reimplementation of the classic Unix beep utility, written in Rust.

It uses the system's audio output rather than the PC speaker, so it works on modern machines.

This utility emulates the frequency response of a classic PC speaker by running a square wave through high-pass and low-pass filters, because an unfiltered square wave through good laptop speakers sounds worse than you'd think (and far less authentic).

cargo install --path .

Or build and copy the binary yourself:

cargo build --release
cp target/release/beep ~/.local/bin/

beep                          # default 440 Hz beep for 200 ms
beep -f 750                   # terminal-bell frequency
beep -f 1000 -l 500 -r 3      # three half-second beeps at 1 kHz
beep -f 523 -l 100 -n -f 659 -l 100 -n -f 784 -l 200   # chord sequence

With -s or -c, beep reads stdin and writes it back to stdout unchanged, beeping on each line or byte respectively. This makes it easy to splice into a pipeline:

make 2>&1 | beep -s | tee build.log

Each --new starts a fresh beep with default values, letting you play sequences of different tones:

beep -f 523 -l 200 -n -f 659 -l 200 -n -f 784 -l 400

This is different from -r, which repeats the same beep multiple times.

This is a faithful reimplementation of the original beep by Johnathan Nightingale, with a few differences:

• Uses the default audio output device via rodio instead of the PC speaker. No root or ioperm needed.
• Runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and anywhere else rodio supports.
• The -e/--device flag is accepted but not implemented (no underlying PC speaker to choose).

The original beep is a wonderful tool that doesn't work on most modern systems, because most modern systems don't have PC speakers.

Released into the public domain under the Unlicense. See LICENSE for the full text.