You can get a wget style progress bar here. Although the easiest thing is to get the long running sub to write to the console if you want it's parent/some other process to do the progress bar you need some sort of IPC perlman:perlipc.

The simplest solution is to have the long running widget update a semaphore file with a number ie how many % or whatever it has done so far. The process you want to do the progress bar just reads the file to get the info it needs. Provided the process generating the progress bar knows what this file will be called you have no problem. Delete this semaphore file when finished to indicate the completed status. There are literally dozens of other methods to do IPC, but at the pace you are talking about a file is the quickest solution and will be efficient enough (ie the overhead will not kill you).

cheers

tachyon

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