Note that if you're just putting a line of symbols on the screen, without extra decoration, you can always print those out sequentially when they are needed (eg, one or two characters at a time), without an extra modules.

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
"I can see my house from here!"
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

stephen

UPDATE</b: And of course dropping the newline as others (inc. Speedy) have pointed out.

--
perl -pe "s/\b;([st])/'\1/mg"

The simple way is to not print a newline after each piece. Then, before each new piece, print as many backspaces as you need ("\b") to get you back to the start of where the new data will go. The new data will have to be at least as long as the old, so pad anything shorter with spaces. Do this with standard output unbuffered. Here's a simple sub I wrote to print ongoing totals:

use strict;
use FileHandle;
use vars qw(@ISA @EXPORT $VERSION);

use Exporter;
$VERSION = 1.00;
@ISA = qw(Exporter);

@EXPORT = qw(print_total);
sub print_total($$)
{
    my $total = shift;
    my $label = shift;
    my $n;

    if ($total == 1)
    {
        STDOUT->autoflush;
        print $label;
    }

    $n = length($total);
    print "$total";
    while ($n-- > 0)
    {
        print "\b";
    }
}
[download]

The other fun one is to print sequences of | / - \ to get one of those spinning progress indicators.

A nice way to do this is the way provided by the LWP::UserAgent module. It allows you to provide a code reference that gets invoked whenever it gets another chunk of a file. Check this:

my $sub = sub {
                my ($data, $res, $proto) = @_;
                
                # either write directly to file or push onto an array
                $filename ? print FILE $data : push(@res_lines, $data)
+;
                
                # increment total length
                $data_recved += length $data;
                
                if ($already_drew_percentage) {                
                    # erase an old sign and draw a new one
                    
                    print "\b" x 9, sprintf('%03d%% done',
                         (($data_recved / $res->content_length) * 100)
+);
                } else {
                    # draw the first percentage
                    
                    printf('%03d%% done',
                         (($data_recved / $res->content_length) * 100)
+);
                   $already_drew_percentage = 1;
           }
};
[download]

(Sorry about the tab mess...I'm not sure how to correct it.) Call it like this:

Where $agent is an LWP::UserAgent, $req is an HTTP::Request and 1024 is the amount of bytes you want to get before invoking $sub.

That was ripped from the pronbot source. It allows you to either write binaries directly to file via the FILE handle and the value of $filename, or push the lines of the response onto an array which can later be joined. (You might have do declare some of the vars yourself :) I'd advocate using an LWP module for basic HTTP stuff, it's very easy, although this probably looks complex.

The CPAN shell does this with Term::ReadKey which I am currently looking after ;-}

/J\