How can I alert on completion of a long task over ssh?

My desktop is Ubuntu, which has the handy program notify-send, which pops up an alert on the desktop. It also has the following handy alias built in: $ type alert alert is aliased to `notify-send --urgency=low -i "$([ $? = 0 ] && echo terminal || echo error)" "$(history|tail -n1|sed -e 's/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//;s/[;&|]\s*alert$//')"' This means that you can run very-long-running-command; alert, leave the terminal running in the background, and receive a notification when the task is complete. When you’re on a CentOS server through ssh, things are a little trickier. Here’s one way to do it: localhost$ ssh me@example.net; alert example.net$ very-long-running-command; exit This works, after a fashion, but exiting after every command is not generally what I want to do. My computer doesn’t have speakers. It can beep.