Issue rapid, consecutive terminal alerts

Question

I'd like to issue 2-3 rapid, consecutive alerts in an automated script running in the standard terminal app.

I am already able to issue a single alert with echo -e '\a'. However, when I try to issue multiple alerts with echo -e '\a\a', there is a noticeable (~1 second) lag between the two alerts.

If I enter commands interactively, I am able to trigger rapid, consecutive alerts by entering echo -e '\a', pressing the up arrow to retrieve the last command, and pressing enter again. There is no noticeable delay between the first and second alert beyond the time it takes me to enter the second command.

However, I'd like to be able to do this from an automated script, so I'd like to be able to avoid the delay in between alerts without having to enter commands manually via keyboard.

Specs: MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) / Apple M1 Pro chip / macOS Monterey 12.3.1

The motivation is to be able to signal failure/success of a long-running command being executed remotely. When running these types of commands locally I use a wrapper around say that tells me via text-to-speech whether the command has succeeded or failed. For remotely-executed commands where text-to-speech is either not an option or not worth the trouble, I'd instead like to be able to use the number of alerts to know the status of the command, without a long delay between multiple alerts.

Answer 1

It seems that you can't run two beep exactly in the same time.

You have to put a little pause between two beep.

I propose you the following function to run the amount of beep you want :

beepFunction () {
        for ((i=0 ; i<$1 ; i++))
        do
                echo -e "\a"
                sleep 0.2
        done
}

Here we use "sleep" to do a pause of 0.2 seconds.

Then you can call the function in this way :

# 4 beep
beepFunction 4

If you prefer a one-line solution, you can use this code :

# 4 beep (0 to 3)
for v in {0..3} ; do echo -e "\a" ; sleep 0.2 ; done