If you don't care about burning machinecycles, you can just put the program in an eternal loop, outputting the things you want at a much faster rate than once a second (just drop the sleep 1): if the present output did not change from the previous output, the screen would seem not to have changed at all, although of course, it was refreshed with the same pattern as before.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law