Back on January 29<\/a> I introduced a Perl program that takes, as input, a waiting time in seconds, then makes three beeps afterwards. The program uses the ASCII bell character, ‘\\a’<\/span>, to make each beep.<\/p>\n The program worked great on Windows; alas, on my Linux (Ubuntu) system, the bell wouldn’t ring. Research revealed that, possibly at several levels in Ubuntu, the ASCII bell has been disabled. One explanation I read was that programmers got tired of hearing it. Whatever the reason, I worried my Ubuntu readers might feel left out in the cold.<\/p>\n However, Linux, like Perl, has “more than one way to do it”:) I recalled from Robert’s Perl tutorial<\/a> that Perl has commands to start external processes; I’d not yet tried any. At the askubuntu<\/a> site, a user called Rinzwind<\/a> pointed out that, on the command line,<\/p>\n aplay \/usr\/share\/sounds\/alsa\/Front_Center.wav<\/span><\/p>\n could be used to play the Front_Center.wav<\/span> file.<\/p>\n Putting together Robert’s and Rinzwind’s advice, I rewrote the Perl program from Jan 29<\/a> to make it open the external process of playing Front_Center.wav<\/span>, as follows: This solution worked immediately!:) I hope it works for you as well.<\/p>\n I am impressed by the Ubuntu community’s commentary on this matter. It fortifies my loyalty to Ubuntu as a great operating system.<\/p>\n I’ll be talking more about Ubuntu and Perl in future posts. I may even look into recording an actual bell sound for this program, although the benign Front_Center.wav<\/span> test sound works fine for now:)<\/p>\n
\n
\n#!\/usr\/bin\/perl
\n
\n$sound=”\/usr\/share\/sounds\/alsa\/Front_Center.wav”;
\n#Above: the sound’s full name as a string<\/span><\/br>
\nprint “Hello. Please enter, in seconds, how long to wait\\n”;
\nprint “before hearing a test sound.”;
\n$secs=<STDIN>;
\nsleep($secs);
\nprint “Okay…here’s the test sound…\\n\\n”;
\nexec(“aplay $sound”); #exec opens the external process<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n