beep does exactly what you would expect: it beeps. Unlike printf("\a"), beep allows you to control pitch, duration, and repetitions. Its job is to live inside shell/perl scripts and allow more granularity than one would otherwise have. It is controlled completely through command line options. It's not supposed to be complex, and it isn't - but it makes system monitoring (or whatever else it gets hacked onto) that much more informative. You may need to set beep executable suid; thre are potential security issues with doing so, but the beep source code is very small and easily auditable, and you won't get a lot of use of it unless it's suid, but that's your call. See the SlackBuild script for the proper variable to change if you want to install it suid.