Disable bell from SSH sessions

Question

On my system I have blacklisted the kernel module pcspkr for years to get rid of the annoying bell in terminals. However, after a recent update to my system I started getting bell sounds again, even though the module is still blacklisted. Plus, I'm also getting bells from SSH sessions now.

The local bell I can disable by adding the following line to my .inputrc:

set bell-style none

But I'm still getting bells from SSH sessions unless I change the inputrc on the remote systems (which would be a pain in the rear to do for all remote systems, and not even possible/allowed in some situations, e.g. on some customer systems).

Isn't there a local setting to get rid of the bell entirely?

Answer 1

I was able to solve the problem by adding the following line to my .xinitrc:

xset -b

which disables the bell in the X server (xset b off instead of xset -b would work too). The command would also work when put in .bashrc, but in that case it should be restricted to X11 sessions:

if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" = 'x11' ]; then
  xset -b
fi

Otherwise it would throw an error like this in a console session:

xset: unable to open display ""

As you may have guessed the suggested fix does not affect console sessions, where the problem persists unless I change the remote config. For the time being that's something I can live with, though, as I rarely use console sessions for anything non-local these days.