beep (make beeps via the PC speaker) beep does exactly what you would expect: it beeps. Unlike printf("\a"), beep allows you to control pitch, duration, and repetitions. Its job is to live inside shell/perl scripts and allow more granularity than one would otherwise have. It is controlled completely through command line options. It's not supposed to be complex, and it isn't - but it makes system monitoring (or whatever else it gets hacked onto) that much more informative. By default, the binary is installed setuid root, but only runnable by root or users in the 'audio' group. You can disable this with SETUID=no in the script's environment, but then beep will only work for root. To get beep to actually make sound, first add "modprobe pcspkr" to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules.local (and also run "modprobe pcspkr" in the shell, to avoid having to reboot), then run alsamixer and look for an audio channel called "Beep" or "PC Speaker". Make sure it's turned up and not muted, then run "alsactl store" as root. On some systems, for some reason, even this won't work: beep runs successfully but doesn't make any sound. Still investigating this; if you have problems, please email the SlackBuild maintainer.