http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=113873


in reply to making a spinner

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