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

I had to tackle something similar to this today. If you don't mind reprinting the entire line, you could do something like this:

print "\n";
while (...) {
     print "\rProgress: $counter / $total";
     # do processing work here
     $counter++;
}
print "\n";

The "\r" character is a carriage return-- it brings the cursor back to the beginning of the line. That way, anything you print out overwrites the previous progress notification's text.