How can I display a percentage-done indication that updates itself in place, or show one of those twirling baton progress indica

Q

How can I display a percentage-done indication that updates itself in place, or show one of those twirling baton progress indicators?

✍: Guest

A

These simple things, at least, you can do fairly portably. Printing the character '\r' will usually give you a carriage return without a line feed, so that you can overwrite the current line. The character '\b' is a backspace, and will usually move the cursor one position to the left.
Using these characters, you can print a percentage-done indicator:
for(i = 0; i < lotsa; i++) {
printf("\r%3d%%", (int)(100L * i / lotsa));
fflush(stdout);
do_timeconsuming_work();
}
printf("\ndone.\n");

or a baton:
printf("working: ");
for(i = 0; i < lotsa; i++) {
printf("%c\b", "|/-\"[i%4]);
fflush(stdout);
do_timeconsuming_work();
}
printf("done.\n");

2015-04-27, 1291👍, 0💬