Apple - Adding movie-style sound effects to the Terminal

Fun question :)

I'm not sure how you would get sound effects for everything but you could do something like this to get sound effects for a few things:

1) Open open your .profile (or .bashrc or wherever you like to keep your customizations) by opening a terminal window and typing:

open .profile

2) Add the following few lines to the bottom of the file:

function top() { afplay /System/Library/Components/CoreAudio.component/Contents/SharedSupport/SystemSounds/accessibility/Sticky\ Keys\ ON.aif; command top;}
function ls() { command ls; afplay /System/Library/Components/CoreAudio.component/Contents/SharedSupport/SystemSounds/accessibility/Slow\ Keys\,\ Key\ Registered.aif; }

3) Try typing 'ls' for a directory listing or 'top' to see the list of running processes & you'll get to hear the results of these commands.

By adding these two lines we are declaring two new functions with the same names as existing bash commands. We override the command itself so that we can play a bit of audio and then run the command itself (or vice versa as shown the 'top' example).

The audio files I am currently using are default audio files (at least on Lion) that are used for accessibility features. I chose these so that you could cut-paste, and see the trick in action but you could use any audio file in place of these.

Here's a site with a bunch of sci-fi sound effects you could use in place of these ones I'm borrowing from the OS:

http://fxhome.com/sounds/