If you are on a system that supports zenity - it is yet another option. It uses a real progress bar which may not be what you want (will only work on your local machine). Here is a very long one liner that makes the use of most zenity progress options (you could shorten it to zenity --progress --pulsate):

perl -e 'open my $fh, "|-", q{zenity --title=Working --width=400 --pro
+gress --text="Still going..." --percentage=50 --no-cancel --auto-kill
+ --auto-close}; select $fh; $|=1; select(undef,undef,undef,.1),print 
+$fh "$_\n#Now on $_...\n" for 1..100'
[download]

Here is the code broken out into more of a program.

use IO::Handle; # for older perls
use Time::HiRes qw(usleep);

my $pid = open my $fh, "|-", q{zenity --title=Working --width=400 --pr
+ogress --percentage=50 --no-cancel --auto-kill --auto-close}
    or die "Could not open zenity: $!";

$fh->autoflush(1);


for my $i (1 .. 100) {
    usleep 100_000; # microseconds
    print $fh "$i\n"; # move the bar
    print $fh "#Now on $i...\n"; # update the text
    print "We've done $i\n";

    if ($i >= 50) {
        #kill 2 $pid; # not as portable
        print $fh "100\n"; # more portable with --auto-kill
        last;
    }
}
[download]

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