On Jul 9, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
>I need to come up with a simple status indicator of some sort. I have in
>mind a "spinner." You've seen them before I'm sure, where there's a '-'
>then it changes to '\' then '|' then '/' then '-' and so forth, so that it
>appears to be spinning. Actually, I really don't care what the status
>indicator looks like, I just want it to be easy to code and move in such a
>way that long-time Windows users will understand that the computer is
>working and has not hung. My solution so far is just to tuck a print "*"
>thing in a while loop that's already present doing other work. This is
>inelegant though, as it prints just thousands of asterisks. I was hoping
>someone knew of a better way. Is there a module?
All you need to do is:
1. fork a process to do the spinning
2. have it spin
3. have the main process kill it when the time-consuming part is done
Here's the bare code needed:
use constant PAUSE => .5; # time to pause in seconds
# part 1
if (my $pid = fork) {
# DO LONG DBI STUFF
# part 3
kill TERM => $pid; # kill the spinning part
}
elsif (defined $pid) {
# part 2
my @chars = qw( / - \ | );
my $i = 0;
$| = 1; # turn off output buffering
while (1) {
print $chars[$i++], "\r";
select(undef, undef, undef, PAUSE);
}
}
--
Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/
I am Marillion, the wielder of Ringril, known as Hesinaur, the Winter-Sun.
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Perl Programmer at RiskMetrics Group, Inc. http://www.riskmetrics.com/
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