#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
no warnings qw /syntax/;

$| = 1;

my @a = qw {| / - \ };
my $a;

while (1) {
    print "\r", $a [$a ++ % @a];
    select undef, undef, undef, 0.25;
}
__END__
[download]

Abigail

Thanks Abigail!

The \r was what I was looking for. I knew it had to be easy!

Not sure about other systems, but many Unix terminals support a backspace character (chr(8)) to step back one, so you can space out a message by repeatedly printing backspace, space, backspace something like this:

my $clear = "\x08 \x08";
while (not $finished) {
  my $string = status();
  print $string;   # without a newline!
  do_more_stuff();
  print $clear x length($string);
}
[download]

Hugo

See peek - output a one-line preview of stdin for my example using this technique.

It looks like you have some good answers above already, but you might also want to take a look at Term::ProgressBar. Even if it doesn't do exactly what you want, it may give you some hints on implementation.

Check out this excerpt from O'Reilly's Spidering Hacks.

HTH,

Vautrin,