Debian (and derivatives like Ubuntu) come with a handy shell alias called `alert`. It is meant to be used after a command or a chain of commands to give feedba

Debian (and derivatives like Ubuntu) come with a handy shell alias called `alert`. It is meant to be used after a command or a chain of commands to give feedback about success or failure. The alias by itself doesn't issue a ping, but can easily be amended to do so. What worked for me is to add an invocation of `paplay`. Actually it is two different invocations, one sound for success and another one for failure. In addition to that I also send an ASCII 0x07. I have both `tput bel` and `echo -e "\a"` in my alias, but don't remember why. Probably one of them is enough. I do this because I have my terminal emulator set to visual bell an that causes the tab to change color when the command is finished and I can immediately see it even if I am in another tab.