Hi Eily

To clarify the Template Toolkit is a web centric tool?
I am not actually interfacing this perl code with any kind of web front end, it is purely a CLI operation, however I had considered using a similar method with a multidimensional hash instead of an array, but when I thought about the complexities of keeping the ordering correct compared to my current requirements for this script an array just seemed simpler.
Anyhow, you have reminded me that I should take another look at Text::Template perhaps I could achieve some similar results using that.

Thanks for your assistance.

To clarify the Template Toolkit is a web centric tool?

Actually, no. It is a perfectly generic templating system - flexible and extensible. The breadth of the facilities which it offers has been recognised as a benefit by many web application developers and so they have used it for that purpose but it is not web-centric.

Here is your script re-written using TT2, for example:

#!/usr/bin/env perl 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Template;

my $t = {
    count     => 42,
    completed => 6
};
my $outtt2 =
  "\rProcessing: [% count %] files to process ; [% completed %] file c
+ompleted\n";
my $template = Template->new;

notify_progress ();

$t->{completed} = 7;

notify_progress ();

sub notify_progress {
    $template->process (\$outtt2, $t);
}
[download]

I've kept the notify_progress() subroutine so you can see the difference. In a real script this subroutine would disappear and just be replaced by the call to process() inline. If you have a need for templating (and most of us do sooner or later) then do take a look at TT2. It is big and has a steep learning curve compared to others but there are tutorials to help you through and if you use it as I have you will be far less likely to hit a limitation of your templating system than with other, lighter alternatives.