This will sound silly.
I need to come up with a simple status indicator of some sort. I have in
mind a "spinner." You've seen them before I'm sure, where there's a '-'
then it changes to '\' then '|' then '/' then '-' and so forth, so that it
appears to be spinning. Actually, I really don't care what the status
indicator looks like, I just want it to be easy to code and move in such a
way that long-time Windows users will understand that the computer is
working and has not hung. My solution so far is just to tuck a print "*"
thing in a while loop that's already present doing other work. This is
inelegant though, as it prints just thousands of asterisks. I was hoping
someone knew of a better way. Is there a module?
(I have a DBI search tool that can handle lots of text strings matched
against a large db. It takes 2-15 minutes to run and users keep killing the
program because they think it's "stuck." For some reason, they never read
the instruction line, printed to the screen, that says "This may take up to
15 minutes.")
Thanks,
John
