I liked the thread idea. How are threads on overhead and processing? The code below seems to work well. However I get the following message when the "Processing Complete" message is printed: "A thread exited while 2 other threads were still running.". Any idea why?

use threads;
use threads::shared;
use strict;
$|++;

my $stream = *STDOUT;
my $thingy = [ "\\", "|", "/", "-" ];
my $rate = 0.175;
my $step = 0;
my $spin_stop : shared;
$spin_stop = 0;

print "Processing...";
my $thread  = threads->create(\&_spin);

select(undef,undef,undef, 5);

print "\nProcessing Completed\n";

$spin_stop = 1;

sub _spin {

   SPIN: while(1) {
      my $old_fh = select($stream);
      local $| = 1;
      print $stream $$thingy[$step],
      chr(8) x length($$thingy[$step]);
      select($old_fh);

      $step = ( $step+1 > $#$thingy ? 0 : $step+1 );

      select(undef,undef,undef, $rate);
      last SPIN if($spin_stop == 1);
   }

   return;
}
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