Let’s say you’ve sadly been running several processes in a row. They take time, so you catch up on your blog reading while they run, but have to keep checking back on the terminal to see if they’re done. Wouldn’t it be nice to know when a command is complete? Easy, just have it ring the Cygwin Terminal Bell!

For example, download a big file, untar it, and let me know when you’re done:

wget fatFile.tar.gz; tar -xf fatFile.tar.gz; echo -e "\a";

So, be sure to \a to ring the bell from now on:

echo -e "\a"