A couple of other things:

• It may be the wrong approach since if it does produce a spinning slash, you will have to wade through a ton of garbage to find what you want. You might want to try putting a "$|++;" at the top of your program to see if this helps (as you may have a buffering problem see Suffering from Buffering? by our own Dominus).
• As far as the console (DOS) window, here is a good thread with many viable solutions.

--Jim

Update: Fixed "thread" link.