Actually this is sort of related to a question I saw earlier about reporting the status of something being done. One thing I always sort of wanted to do is make a spinner. By spinner I mean a simple section of text which changes from | to / to - to \ . While I was booting Free BSD and watching one, I thought about how something like this could enhance my programs, and at least show that they're still working (and not hanging) - this became especially apperent today when I wrote an encryption program that takes a LONG time. If I could somehow show something happening around every 100th iteration of the main loop, I could at least show that it is doing something. But here's the catch, I want it to work in both Unix AND Windows. I know Term has the functionality I need, but it doesn't support Windows. About the only thing I could come up with was the following (this is just example code):

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $spinner;
my @spinState = ("-", "\\", "|", "/");

foreach(1..25) {
  print "Working: " . $spinState[$spinner] . "\n";
  print "    \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n";
  sleep(1);

}

[download]

And as you can see that's basically a pile of slop and not any real sort of solution. Actually just being able to overwrite the last character written to the screen is all I need. Any Ideas?

In reply to making a spinner by archen

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.