how to get a beep, OS independent ?

[J. Cliff Dyer]

On Sun, 2008-12-07 at 21:13 +0000, Peter Pearson wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:40:53 +0100, Stef Mientki wrote:
> >
> > I want to give a small beep,
> > for windows there's message-beep,
> > and there seems to be something like " curses" ,
> > but that package seems to be totally broken in P2.5 for windows.
> >
> > Any other suggestions ?
> 
> Many people have suggested sending an ASCII 07 to your
> terminal window, but sometimes you don't have a terminal
> window.
> 
> Then there's the question of using the sound card versus
> using the PC speaker.  Too complicated for me.
> 
> I used a kluge: a short C program that beeps the way I want,
> in this case using ioctl(fd,KDMKTONE,arg) on /dev/tty0 (this
> is Linux).  The program has enough privileges to execute
> even when run by unprivileged users, and of course can be
> invoked by whatever language you're working in.
> 

If you're already using /dev/tty0, why not just open a file object
on /dev/tty0, and write "\a"=="\x07" to that.  No C required.

#!/usr/bin/env python
nonstdout = file("/dev/tty0")
nonstdout.write("\a")
nonstdout.flush()

(same permissions caveats apply)

On the other hand, the OP was looking for a cross-platform solution.  I
don't think Windows has a /dev/tty0, but I don't work on windows, so I
can't help with cross platform issues.

Cheers,
Cliff