Bells, whistles, and flashing lights: beep and flash

Occasionally, you may want to get a user's attention. Two low-level ETI routines are designed to help you do this--they let you ring the terminal's chimes and flash its screen.

flash flashes the screen if possible, and otherwise rings the bell. Flashing the screen is intended as a bell replacement, and is particularly useful if the bell bothers someone within ear shot of the user. The routine beep can be called when a real beep is desired. (If for some reason the terminal is unable to beep, but able to flash, a call to beep will flash the screen.)

SYNOPSIS

   #include <ocurses.h>
   

   int flash()
   int beep()

• flash tries to flash the terminals screen, if possible, and, if not, tries to ring the terminal bell.

• beep tries to ring the terminal bell, if possible, and, if not, tries to flash the terminal screen.

• beep will not work if you redefine TRUE to something other than 1.

• Neither returns any useful value.