progress bars and such...

[Colonel Sanders]

I was wondering if someone could help me figure out how to write a program which would simply display a "spinning line". By a spinning line I simply mean a character that would change, cycling through |, /, -, \, and back to | to give the illusion that the line is spinning. I know I've seen this on some flavors of Linux.

I only want this to show that the program is still running and not locked up, plus I think it looks cool. =)

Any suggestions?

TIA, L J

[aym]

Here you go:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
                                                                                
int main(void) {
        char c[4] = "|/-\\";
        int i = 0;
        while (1) {
                printf("\r%c", c[i]);
                fflush(stdout);
                i = (i + 1) % 4;
                sleep(1);
        }
        return 0;
}

Ctrl+C to break out.

[Colonel Sanders]

Is the second "\" in a row a typo or necessary, will fflush (stdout) clear the whole screen or just where the character, and how do I position this character at say, the upper right corner of the screen?

Also you say Ctrl + C to break out, what part of the code causes this? I was thinking of doing something like a while loop ( while x==0 ), then pushing a key would change the value of x to exit the program.

L J

[aym]

No, the second \ is not a typo, \ is the escape character, \n means a new line for example, so you need two \s to actually get one \ .

fflush (stdout) sends the output from the buffer to the screen, it doesn't clear the screen, \r is the one that clears the previous character.

Ctrl+C sends a signal to the program, and the program exits because it doesn't handle the signal, your way to exit can be used too.

[Colonel Sanders]

I'm pretty sure I have DJGPP configured wrong or something, I have compiled your code and another far less complex (just a little more advanced than a "hello world" app though) and the cursor randomly moves around the screen.

CMD proceeds to crash, than eventually I get an error something about "the file sent to LPT1 cant be printed, no printer attached"...

Any suggestions on how to configure DJGPP for Windows 2000? I am running version 2.03, which the DJGPP website claimed would work with Win2K...

TIA, L J

*any recomendations for a free compiler that will work with Windows 2000?

[aym]

Hmm, I didn't test that under Windows, I thought you were looking for a Linux program.

For Windows, I suggest you try DevC++: (free)
http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/devcpp.html

Replace unistd.h with windows.h, and sleep(1) with Sleep(100).

Let me know if it works, I'll try to test it to under Windows too.