Interesting... are whirleygigs and spinners also one of the rites of passage as one becomes more adept at perl? (Just curious...)

As to the code, I don't think I've seen one that waited for the timer-tick like that. Would the use of "\r" be an issue? (I would have suspected the use of the backspace character "\b" instead, but I haven't tried it myself yet... might also depend on the terminal, though.)

Personally, I tend to do something like the following (adapted here from a previous posting), but that's just me:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

$| = 1;
my @spinner = ('|', '/', '-', '\\');
my $bigscale = 100_000;
my $scale = 100;
my $index = 0;

  # replace the following two lines 
  # with a loop appropriate to the project
  my $in_loop = 1;
  while ($in_loop) {

    # Do work.
    print $spinner[($index++ / $scale) % 4], "\b";
    print '.' unless ($index % $bigscale);

    # And for completeness, for demonstration purposes...
    $in_loop = 0 if ($index > (($scale / 2) * $bigscale));
  }
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Updated: (08 Dec 2003) Corrected use of "rites" instead of "rights." (Thank you, liz, for the correction.)