After reading the posting again and again, I think that you really search for a progress bar or something like that. You want to move the cursor and change a character on the (virtual) terminal. And seek just don't let you do that. Am I right?

If yes, you are searching for information about terminal control codes. One of the most primitive ones is the backspace, and it works on nearly every terminal. Stupid example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
$|=1;
my @spinner=qw( / - \ | );
print "Wait ... ";
for my $i (0..19) {
        print "$spinner[$i % 4]\b";
        sleep 1;
}
print "- done\n";

[download]

There are much more terminal control codes. Unless you work with exotic hardware or exotic operating systems, the generic VT100 or xterm codes will work. There are libraries that take care of the actual codes, like termcap and the newer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminfo. Libraries like curses and the newer ncurses add functions for text mode user interfaces. You can get Perl interfaces for all of those libraries on CPAN.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

In reply to Re: seek() command on STDOUT by afoken
in thread seek() command on STDOUT by ybnormal

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