Turning off the cmd window beep sound

Is there a way to essentially mute the Beeping function of the Windows command shell?

I'm working on a PowerShell script right now which ends up printing several lines of text to the screen. I'm working out a bug in the encoding logic. But every time I'm wrong my script will spew a bunch of random binary characters to the screen and eventually cause many annoying beeps.

The failure is quite obvious without the beeps :)

Solution 1:

The Windows command line command net stop beep will turn off the beeping, and net start beep will turn on the beeping. Source

It should be noted that the instruction stops the beep globally on windows and not on just for within the windows command shell. Also, the service will run again when you reboot your computer.

@Ady's answer will suffice. But if you want to just disable it per instance, you can always put this method into a batch file (but it's so short you can just type it) and run it.

Solution 2:

To control the Beep service startup from the command line, disable the service across reboots with:

C:\Windows\system32>sc config beep start= disabled
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS

Re-enable with

C:\Windows\system32>sc config beep start= auto
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS

Note the spacing on the sc config in the above examples, as it has specific requirements.

To do this from Powershell:

PS C:\Windows\System32> set-service beep -startuptype automatic
PS C:\Windows\System32> set-service beep -startuptype disabled

Solution 3:

Perform the following steps to disable your machine's system beep:

1. Right-click My Computer and select Manage.
2. Expand System Tools and select Device Manager.
3. From the View menu, select Show hidden devices.
4. Expand Non-Plug and Play Drivers.
5. Right-click Beep, and select Properties.
6. Select the Drivers tab.
7. Click Stop. You can also change the start-up type to Disabled so the beep service never starts.

Ref: http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/15508/how-do-i-stop-windows-2000-from-beeping.html

Solution 4:

There are two sounds you can adjust from Sound settings in Windows 10:

1. Critical Stop
2. Default Beep

I set both to none and I'm blessed with silence

Solution 5:

Set-PSReadlineOption -BellStyle Visual

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/reference/5.1/PSReadline/Set-PSReadlineOption