I’ve always liked the way some long running console utilities display their status without having to print a new line. For example the little spinner that alternates displaying |, /, and \. Or various internet utilities that display the percentage of the file that has been downloaded.

I recently wrote a utility to kick off parallel RSpec tasks on remote instances and wanted to report the results back to the console after pinging the utility every few seconds. I accomplished this with a cool little trick - the \r.

(1..10).each do |percent|
  print "\r#{percent*10}% complete"
  sleep(0.5)
end

This little scripts begins by printing 10% complete and works up to 100% complete in 10 percent increments. It’s a cool way to notify the user of your Ruby utility that the script is still progressing and that it hasn’t simply stopped dead in its tracks.

One thing to keep in mind is that you are overwriting the previous line, so if your previous line is of a longer length than the next one, you might need to pad it with whitespace to cover up the last message.