Printing binary data to a terminal makes it beep — courtesy of the ASCII BEL character
GoddenThomas · x · 2026-09-19
- While printing binary data to a terminal, the author's terminal started making noise — caused by the ASCII control character BEL (␇, value 7) appearing in the data.
- BEL historically triggered a physical bell or buzzer in terminals; in modern systems it can still trigger an alert sound, often written as '\a' in C/C++.
- A fun piece of retro computing trivia: a stray byte stream can literally make your terminal play music.
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