You really should tell us a little more about the program which you are running for the minute, for which you want to display a progressbar. There are a few better options which you are unaware of, but they depend on the behavior of the long-running app. Does your app output anything that can be used to indicate progress, or when it has finished? If so, you can run it thru IPC::Open3, a piped open, or even in a thread, and you can get a very nice progress bar. Tell us more, or we can only guess, and tell you clunky solutions.