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.
4248415dde