How can I play a sound from the command line in Mac OS X?

Question

I would like to play a short sound file from the command line in Mac OS X, independent of any audio player application, in order to provide notification that a long job has finished.

Answer 1

There is a built-in tool: afplay <sound file>. The man page does not document all of its options, which can be found via afplay -h:

Usage:
afplay [option...] audio_file

Options: (may appear before or after arguments)
  {-v | --volume} VOLUME
    set the volume for playback of the file
  {-h | --help}
    print help
  { --leaks}
    run leaks analysis  {-t | --time} TIME
    play for TIME seconds
  {-r | --rate} RATE
    play at playback rate
  {-q | --rQuality} QUALITY
    set the quality used for rate-scaled playback (default is 0 - low quality, 1 - high quality)
  {-d | --debug}
    debug print output

It will not play more than one audio file.

Answer 2

One time, when the power went off at work, knowing that my firewall would return to that last state (powered on) when the electricty came back on, I wrote a script in bash that used the say command to wake me up when the power came back on.

Answer 3

Have you considered printf "\a\a\a" or echo -e "\a\a\a"?