Update command line output

Question

My program (which happens to be in Perl, though I don\'t think this question is Perl-specific) outputs status messages at one point in the program of the form Progress: x/

Answer 1

Say

$| = 1

somewhere early in your program to turn autoflushing on for the output buffer.

Also consider using "\r" to move the cursor back to the beginning of the line, rather than trying to explicitly count how many spaces you need to move back.

Like you said, don't print out a newline while your progress counter is running or else you will print out your progress on a separate line instead of overwriting the old line.