consider using a "spinner" which twirls in place

Hmm, spinner, spinner, spinner

Term::Spinner - A progress spinner for commandline programs

Dancer::Logger::Spinner - Show a spinner in the console on Dancer log messages!

Game::Pexeso::Spinner - A spinner used to show progress.

Acme::Spinner - A trivial example of one of those activity spinners

ProgressMonito - a flexible and configurable framework for providing feedback on how a long-running task is proceeding

Wx::Perl::Throbber - An animated throbber/spinner

Term::Twiddle - Twiddles a thingy while-u-wait

Term::MultiSpinner - Term::Spinner with multiple spinners

http://search.cpan.org/perldoc/UI::Dialog::Backend::ASCII#spinner(_)

Good call quester :)