How to turn off console beep

Sometimes it is necessary to be more quiet, when using the shell. For example, when working in groups, or if you're just annoyed of the beep.

On the console you can set the volume of the console beep with wsconsctl.

To display the current volume enter:

# wsconsctl bell.volume

You can control the volume setting different values. To turn the volume off enter:

# wsconsctl -w bell.volume=0

This may not work on every hardware. The solution is to set the the bell pitch to 0 Hz.

# wsconsctl -w bell.pitch=0

The bell pitch defaults to 1500 Hz. Sometimes a lower value is more comfortable. Just keep trying.

X11

If you are working with X11, you can turn off the console beep using the command xset.

If you are using modular Xorg you need to install xset, it is under x11/xset.

To turn the console beep off enter:

$ xset b off

To turn it back on, enter:

$ xset b on

You can also set the volume and the pitch of the beep. This is not always supported, depending on the hardware.

However if you want to set volume and pitch you can do something like that:

$ xset b 10 1000 100