You may have thought that the spin subroutine somehow runs at the same time with the main process, but that's not true: it's called in each iteration of the loop, $j never exceeds 1 (as explained), so each turn of the loop waits for 0.1*4=0.4 seconds and prints four characters: -, \, |, and /. You may want to use threads to make your subroutine run in parallel, as suggested above.
The idea of the spin function is printing only one character each time, incrementing the counter and continuing the loop, without sleeping or waiting for something else, without any inner loops. Consider this code:
The spin subroutine constructs an array of spinning characters, prints the character passed to it by index as the first argument, increments the index by one and makes it the remainder of devision by 4 (so it doesn't exceed possible index of spin character array). By modifying $_[0] directly it automatically modifies the $j variable passed as argument. Edit: little rephrasing in the first paragraphsub spin { # as "golfy" as I could imagine for now print [qw{/ - \ |}]->[$_[0]++]."\033[1D"; $_[0]%=4; } # ... #somewhere outside the loop my $j = 0; # ... foreach (@list_level_current_version) { spin($j); # print next spinning character # do the useful work if ($_ =~ /\Q$pattern/) { $dir = $_; last OUTER; } # ... }
In reply to Re^3: Spinning cursor while waiting for search/copy process to be finished
by aitap
in thread Spinning cursor while waiting for search/copy process to be finished
by Ingvar
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