The above suggestions utilizing "\b" should work fine for your purposes, but if you need to do any terminal manipulation in Windows, you should look into
Win32::Console.
The following code basically duplicates the "\b" examples utilizing Win32::Console:
#!c:/perl/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Win32::Console;
my $console = new Win32::Console(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
$console->Cursor(-1,-1,-1,0); # Turn off cursor blink
foreach (1..3) {
foreach( ("-", "\\", "|", "/") ){
$console->Cursor(0); #Move cursor to beginning of line
$console->Write($_);
sleep 1;
}
}
$console->Cursor(-1,-1,-1,1); # Reset cursor blink
Using "\b" is obviously preferable in this case, but if you're looking into doing anything more complex Win32::Console is a good thing to keep in mind.
--grummerX