There are at least three command line ways to accomplish this by putting the suiting command at the end of your script you may invoke for your lengthy process:

1. The "classical" way to play a sound is to use beep.

   
   

   Beep will make a tone through the PC speaker. However this will not work in all cases (e.g. in my system PC speakers are completely disabled) You may have to remove pcspkr from /etc/modprobe/blacklist.conf and load the pcspkr kernel module:

   
   

   sudo sed -i 's/blacklist pcspkr/#blacklist pcspkr/g' /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
   
   sudo modprobe pcspkr
   
   beep [optional parameters]
   
   

   
   



2. We can also play any sound file in wav format using aplay (installed by default):

   
   

    aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Side_Right.wav
   
   

   
   



3. Another way is to use the pulseaudio command line interface to enable playback of any sound files your system (in libsndfile) recognizes on the default audio output:

   
   

     paplay /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga
   
   

   
   

We can use default sound files from /usr/share/sounds/, or any other sound file we may have in a different location.

Just to have mentioned it, there is another nice way to achieve this by misusing espeak, which is installed by default in Ubuntu <= 12.04. See, or rather hear the following example:

#! /bin/bash



c=10; while [ $c -ge 0 ]; do espeak $c; let c--; done; sleep 1 ## here lengthy code

espeak "We are done with counting"

In Ubuntu >= 12.10 Orca uses speak-dispatcher. We can then install espeak, or alternatively use spd-say "Text".