From: Gabriele Marrone <gabriele.marrone@...>
Date: 2006-11-02T09:37:04+09:00
Subject: Re: counter


Il giorno 02/nov/06, alle ore 01:21, Lucas Handelsman ha scritto:

> but I don't want a linebreak after the counter is displayed.  I  
> want it
> just to keep refreshing itself, basically.  Am I missing something  
> with
> puts or print or p?  Any ideas?

This isn't language dependent, and there isn't a "standard" way which  
will work under every environment.

Under Unix you can print the character \r to go back to the beginning  
of the line, but keep in mind that stdout (unlike stderr) is line  
buffered: by default, it prints its output just when a line break is  
found. If you want to force it to write to your console, you have to  
flush it manually.
Try something like this:

10.times do |i|
   print "\r#{i} "
   sleep 0.5
   $stdout.flush
end
print "\n"

I don't think it would work under Windows. Does it?
Anyway, even if it won't work on a specific console, the user will be  
able to understand its output anyway (especially because of the space  
I left at the end of the string), so it shouldn't be a big issue.