[Ghoser777]

I thought I saw how to do this somewhere before, but I can't remember where exactly. I want to be print out information to stdout the way thet wget and scp do with their progress bar. That is, I want to be able to write out characters to specifically locations in stdout (or do I just rewrite the whole line, I dunno).

Thanks,
Matt

[clarkgoble]

I'm not following you. You mean write characters to specific places on the terminal screen?

If you want to get fancy, doing stuff like they used to do before graphical windows became popular, check out curses.h. Here's a good reference manual.

http://jnagy.com/Ftp/download/public...C%20Curses.pdf

Here's a good introduction and overview.

http://www.wrkgrp.com/support/Curses.html

Probably both of those will seem a tad daunting. Especially since you'll only be doing a few simple things out of the library. The following is a pretty good tutorial that goes through some very simple code.

http://saathi.ncst.ernet.in/~pgdst/p...20Tutorial.htm

You should be able to pick out of that a few functions that will do what you are looking for.

[Rickster]

Curses is good for plenty of things, but it's overkill for a one-line "progress bar" animation.

You can "animate" a single line of text by printing over it multiple times -- print a line, then issue a carriage return instead of a newline. For example:

Code:
printf(" 10 %% #\r");
printf(" 20 %% ##\r");
printf(" 30 %% ###\r");
...
printf(" 90 %% #########\r");
printf("100 %% ##########\r");

[Ghoser777]

Originally posted by Rickster:
Curses is good for plenty of things, but it's overkill for a one-line "progress bar" animation.

You can "animate" a single line of text by printing over it multiple times -- print a line, then issue a carriage return instead of a newline. For example:

Code:
printf(" 10 %% #\r");
printf(" 20 %% ##\r");
printf(" 30 %% ###\r");
...
printf(" 90 %% #########\r");
printf("100 %% ##########\r");

Thanks Richster... but you forgot one thing. One will probably want to flush the printf buffer (aka stdout) in the case of a progress bar because the prtinf buffer doesn't get normally flushed to screen unless there's a newline character. Small modification, but it would be like this:

Code:
int i;
for(i=0; i<10; i++)
{
    printf("%d progress so far",10*i);
    fflush(stdout);
}

Thanks,
Matt