Dear Perl Monks,
I kneel before you once again to ask for your guidance. I have cleaned up my twirling baton progress indicator as follows:

#Twirling baton progress indicator
sub twirling_baton {
    my $interval = 1;  #Sleep time between twirls
    my $tcount = 0;
    my @baton = qw( | / - \ );
    $| = 1;

    while ($interval) {
        $tcount++;
        print $baton[ $tcount % @baton ];
        sleep ($interval);
        print "\b\b";
    }
}

[download]
I need to execute a shell script program during which the progress indicator is running. How can I start the twirling baton in Perl and then suspend it when I need to execute a system call to run the shell script in Perl? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Perl noob

Followup:
Thanks for all your suggestions =) I finally came up with this code that appears to work (still testing).
my $pid;
    
if ($pid = fork) { 
    &twirling_baton();
    waitpid($pid,0) 
    }
else {
    system("$program < $temp_file");
    defined($pid) or die "fork: $!\n";
    exit;
}

[download]

In reply to Executing a shell script with progress indicator by axl163

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