Play sound after command and also pipe output

Question

I can easily pipe the output of a command like:

some_command | less

I can also easily play a sound after a command like:

echo test; print \\a 

aplay, beep or others could also be used for sound.

What I need is to do both, I mean, play the sound and pipe the output. Something like (it doesn't work)

 (echo test; print \\a ) | less

Of course, if I do this, the sounds play after less quits, which is not what I want:

echo test | less ; print \\a

This code works:

echo test > /tmp/tmp.txt ; print \\a ; less /tmp/tmp.txt 

However, I found it quite inelegant. There can be also annoying problems if executing more than one at the same time. They can be solved with a script, but it becomes unnecessarily complicated. Any better solution?

Answer 1

It seems that the overall goal is not to use the temporary file?
That's going to be nearly impossible not to involve a file.

If you want to avoid /tmp/tmp.txt you can use a FIFO.

mkfifo myfifo
(echo test; print \\a > /dev/tty) > myfifo &
less < myfifo
rm myfifo

You have to put it somewhere, but this might be a little more elegant than /tmp.

The echo test uses myfifo, and print \\a sends the alert character directly to /dev/tty. The & runs a subshell in the background, concurrently with less.

Answer 2

What about something like this:

echo test | (sleep 1; echo done) & speaker-test -t sine -f 1000 -l 1

This way your command (which is in the parenthesis, just for testing I put there a sleep to make it long running) will run in the background, and the sound (which is a loud sine wave in this example) will play.

If you need the command in the foreground, then you can do this:

(echo test; speaker-test -t sine -f 1000 -l 1 > /dev/null &) | less

Here piping the sound to /dev/null is needed, otherwise it will be piped into less, which is probably not desired.

Answer 3

After reading the answers, I realized that I could simple do:

(echo test; print \\a > /dev/tty ) | less

The problem with print was that the sound was done through the console, so a redirect solves the problem. With a console free way (like speaker-test or aplay) it would work without the redirection, though this is the simplest way, without an external program.