How to update a printed message in terminal without reprinting

Question

I want to make a progress bar for my terminal application that would work something like:

 [XXXXXXX       ] 

which would give a visual indi

Answer 1

It's a different language, but this question might be of assistance to you. Basically, the escape character \r (carriage Return, as opposed to \n Newline) moves you back to the beginning of your current printed line so you can overwrite what you've already printed.

Answer 2

'\r' will perform a carriage return. Imagine a printer doing a carriage return without a linefeed ('\n'). This will return the writing point back to the start of the line... then reprint your updated status on top of the original line.