Show HN: Onhold – Play sounds while and after shell jobs complete

I like how it plays nice with linux pipes.

I've used this on macOS before to accomplish the same thing:

`afplay ~/song.mp3 & do_something_slow; pkill afplay; tput bel`

In iTerm 2, I have it set up to play a sound when certain commands finish, but it hadn't occurred to me that having hold music while the job is still processing could be useful.

Yet now that I think about it, there have been times when I've briefly stepped away from my desk and missed the notification sound. This utility would solve that problem!

To ring terminal bell after running process

> Ctrl+g # (^g)

Or any of:

> tput bel

> echo -n -a "\a"

> echo $'\a'

I have been using a script for years also called ding. By default it emits one control-G, but if it is passed a numeric argument, it emits N dings in a row with a sleep 1 between each.

A few years back I was in a grind on a project where I would kick off regressions, then 30-90 minutes later they'd finish depending on how many slots I was getting in the server farm. I had a script that sent a message to my personal email account with a magic subject line. On my email client I had a filter that detected that subject line and attached a "play a sound" action to that filter, with the sound being an alarm clock going off. That way I could kick off a regression, take a nap, then get woken up when it finished.

I use the idletime (among other factors) to decide the alarm's duration.

  getidle-darwin () {
      ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | awk '/HIDIdleTime/ {print 
  $NF/1000000000; exit}'
  }