LKBEN11027: Howto deactivate the bell or beep under linux

Symptom

You are nerved by the beeping of your system by every error you make

Cause

This is by design

Solution

First thing you need to know is where to deactivate the bell / beep. As you might have found out, there are a lot of possible reactions your system can produce and these depend on the shell, the editor or even the desktop you are using.

To deactivate the bell under bash you can try the following:

setterm -blength 0

This sets the bell duration to 0 milli seconds or you can use the setting in .bashrc

set bell-style visible

Note that these settings only work in a normal command line bash. This is not the case for "konsole" in kde. There we can use the setting menu, click on the bell and set it to visible.

Under vi you need to do the following:

:set visualbell

Under X-windows we normally use:

xset b off

Hope this helped you. 

About the Author

Wim Peeters is electronics engineer with an additional master in IT and over 30 years of experience, including time spent in support, development, consulting, training and database administration. Wim has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5. He has developed in C/C++, Java and C# on Windows and Linux. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform.

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