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.