Command Line Apps "Beach ball"

rubyonrails-talk
1

I find myself writing a lot of scripts at work lately that generate reports on the command line. I was thinking it might be kind of fun to have a "beach ball" effect on the cursor to let the user know stuff is happening. For example, I remember install screens for DOS programs used to have the pipe character "spin" around. Is there a library that handles this sort of thing?

James

2

I find myself writing a lot of scripts at work lately that generate reports on the command line. I was thinking it might be kind of fun to have a "beach ball" effect on the cursor to let the user know stuff is happening. For example, I remember install screens for DOS programs used to have the pipe character "spin" around. Is there a library that handles this sort of thing?

If you have a reasonable normal shell you could do this:

spinners = ['|', '/', '-', '\\'] printf "%s", spinners[0] STDOUT.flush 1.upto(1000) do |i|    printf "\b%s", spinners[i % spinners.size]    STDOUT.flush    sleep(0.1) end

Works on OSX's bash anyway... I'm sure someone out there can condense that into one line :slight_smile: Replace the sleep() call with something that takes awhile to process otherwise all you see is a blur.

-philip