Many people here have written some form of a progress bar. There is even Term::ProgressBar on CPAN.

Super Search for "progress bar". Don't want to weed through the overwhelming number of posts? Check out Progress Bar for a good place to start.

I hope you enjoy using this little snippet as much as I enjoyed writing it!

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

my $reps = 100;
my $delay = 100; # in milliseconds
$delay/=1000;

my @star = qw(| / - \\);
for(1..$reps) {
  for(@star) {
    print "\r$_";
    select(undef, undef, undef, $delay);
  }
}
[download]

A rotating star using the characters \ | / - (seen on some unix install tools)

This is actually quite easy to achieve using the Tie::Cycle module ...

use Tie::Cycle;

tie my $whirley, 'Tie::Cycle', [ qw( | / - \ ) ];

#   And now for the demonstration ...

++$|;

while (1) {
    print $whirley, "\b";
    sleep 1;
}
[download]

There a number of other ways to implement such eye-candy discussed in this thread.

perl -le 'print+unpack("N",pack("B32","00000000000000000000001000000010"))'

But, it looks like Win32::ANSIConsole is a wrapper to intercept the control codes and call the Console API to do things between sending the output on to the real device handle. It looks like exactly what you need.

If that's too rough for you, get inspiration from it. Write your own filehandle tie that calls the Win32::Console commands to position the cursor, draw text, change colors, etc.

Hmm, I wonder why nobody has written something you can pipe into that does this.

For another idea, I just did some colorized output in a program, but was using a Tk text window for the output, along with some GUI buttons and indicators. You might want to do that, so you can implement your status indicator plus a colored console within a window, rather than using a TTY.

—John

perl -ne 'print /ERROR/ ? "\033[1;31m\033[40m$_\033[0m" : $_ ' my.log
[download]

 perl -e 'print "\b" . substr("|/-\\", time % 4, 1 ) while 1'
[download]