Curses has quite a few functions, some of which you may
find useful. The addstr();refresh() functions
do what you want.
There are also more full-featured curses functions in
Curses::Forms and Curses::Widgets.
Here is a snippet that uses Curses to do something like
what you want. The hard part is figuring out how to
keep the screen refreshed while your code is off doing
something more interesting.
use strict;
use Curses;
my $mwh = new Curses;
$mwh->addstr(8, $LINES-2, 'Initialized...');
$mwh->refresh;
sleep 2;
for (qw(Show_me_first I'm_second Third_then_quit))
{
$mwh->addstr(8, $LINES-2, sprintf("%15s",$_));
$mwh->refresh();
sleep 2;
}
END
{
endwin(); # Make Curses clean up after itself
}
The Perl Curses module documentation assumes
that you already understand the curses library. For simple
tasks, it's not too bad to figure out. As your requirements
become more complex, it is easy to get bogged down in the
details of curses. Another approach would be to use a
GUI status window such as one provided by Tk
(warning: Tk link returns lots of stuff).
It should work perfectly the first time! - toma |