in reply to Outputing a simple counter to stdout on the same line.

This should work on *nix systems. 
$|=1;
for (1..3){
  print "\r$_";sleep 1;
}

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You have to make sure you autoflush ($|=1), otherwise it doesn't work...
Update: Dammit... beaten to it by FunkyMonk!

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom