Dearest Monks, remember back in the days of DOS when some programs would put in an indicator that the program wasn't locked up but was actually doing something? It was a series of slashes and dashes overlaid over the top of the last so that it appeared to be a "sparkle" Sort of an animated asterisk.

So I was looking through "cool uses for perl" saw a posting with a "Text to animated pseudo-braille GIF" which looks like it would do a similar thing in a gif file. It got me thinking about it again.

So here's what I came up with but it's not very swanky and I have to do a system "cls"; between every display which makes the text flash as well (I'd use something besides cls if I knew how). I couldn't figure out any other way to control what line on the screen the sparkle sparkled on. 


# !cqperl (that's all I have here at work)
use strict;
use warnings;
my $count = 0;
my @sparkle = qw(\ | / - |);
while ($count < 100 ){
  my $thingy=shift(@sparkle);
  system"cls";
  print "This is a sparkle: $thingy\n";
  sleep .99;
  push(@sparkle, $thingy);
  $count++;
}

[download]
Any ideas? How could I make it better?

Thanks, Gretchen

(aka sparkle farkle) - Oh yeah? Well, if you get the ref you're that old too!

In reply to Creating a Sparkle in perl by gj2666

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