From: Tim Pease <tim.pease@...>
Date: 2006-11-08T11:24:51+09:00
Subject: Re: How to make a cycling counter from commandline?

On 11/7/06, David Vallner <david@vallner.net> wrote:
> Tim Pease wrote:
> > That should do you what you want.  The secret is the carriage return
> > "\r" at the beginning of the print string. That will bring the cursor
> > back to the beginning of the line and then overwrite anything
> > currently on that line.
> >
>
> Smells unportable between Linux, Windows, and Mac Classic. Then again, I
> don't know what approach Ruby takes to newline-handling on non-Unix
> platforms.
>

"\r" is completely portable.  win32 platforms use a "\r\n" for the end
of a line, and *NIX uses just a single "\n" -- hence the dos2unix
utility.

Now, the ANSI control character to clear to the end of a line
(mentioned earlier in this thread) is definitely not portable to the
win32 cmd shell.

TwP