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

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