Fair enough, so you need a sort of "I'm still doing something" row of dots that emerges as work progresses.

It's a little unfortunate how File::Copy::Recursive implements recursion in dircopy. I mean it works great, but it's hard to hook into. However, the dircopy subroutine calls fcopy which is easier to wrap. So this seems to work as I had hoped:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Copy::Recursive qw(dircopy);
use Hook::WrapSub qw(wrap_subs);
use IO::Handle;

sub after_dircopy {
    print '.';
    STDOUT->flush;
}

wrap_subs sub {},
          'File::Copy::Recursive::fcopy',
          \&after_dircopy;

dircopy('/tmp/test1', '/tmp/test2');
print "\n";
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I'm wrapping the fcopy function, which dircopy calls by adding a sub that fires off after each fcopy call. The wrapper prints a dot and flushes STDOUT.

One warning: This depends on an implementation detail of dircopy. There are no guarantees the module's author couldn't change how dircopy works, rendering this broken.