The above suggestions utilizing "\b" should work fine for your purposes, but if you need to do any terminal manipulation in Windows, you should look into Win32::Console.

The following code basically duplicates the "\b" examples utilizing Win32::Console:

#!c:/perl/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Win32::Console;
my $console = new Win32::Console(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);


$console->Cursor(-1,-1,-1,0);    # Turn off cursor blink

foreach (1..3) {
    foreach( ("-", "\\", "|", "/") ){
        $console->Cursor(0);    #Move cursor to beginning of line
        $console->Write($_);
        sleep 1;
    }
}

$console->Cursor(-1,-1,-1,1);    # Reset cursor blink
[download]

Using "\b" is obviously preferable in this case, but if you're looking into doing anything more complex Win32::Console is a good thing to keep in mind.

--grummerX