Busy animation?

Hi,

I've written a program which takes a while to complete what it has to do, going through a loop several billion times (You'd think it'd be speedy on a P4, but nooooooooo... :rolleyes: ), and I've tried adding a "busy" animation so I know it hasn't crashed. The way I tried to do it was:-

Code:

---

char chBusy[4] = { 0x2F, 0x2D, 0x5C, 0x7C }; // "/", "-", "\", "|"
int iBusyIndex = 0;

(inside loop)
putchar(0x08); // backspace to remove previous character
putchar(chBusy[iBusyIndex++]);
if (iBusyIndex = 4)
        iBusyIndex = 0;
else
        iBusyIndex++;

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However, this doesn't produce the desired effect. I can't actually see the animation (perhaps it changes too quickly?) and the cursor hops back and forth like mad. What's the proper way, please? :D

An example, courtesy of Prelude:

Code:

---

#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

void sleep ( long milli )
{
  clock_t end, current = clock();
  for( end = current + milli; current < end; current = clock() );
}

int main ( void )
{
  int x = 0;
  const char *barRotate = "|\\-/";
  printf ( "Loading configuration files... " );
  for ( ; ; ) {
    if ( x > 3 ) x = 0;
    printf ( "%c\b", barRotate[x++] );
    sleep ( 200 );
  }
  return 0;
}

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You probably won't want the sleep in your program, I only include it here to show you a complete working example.

Whoops, looks like I don't know all the printf flags, that's a much better way of doing it, thanx :)

Code:

---

void showwhirl()
{
    int i, j;
    char whirl[] = {'|','/','-','\\\'};

    for (i=0;i<=2; i++)
    {
        for (j=0; j<=3; j++)
        {
            printf("%c", whirl[j]);
            delay(25);
            printf("\b");
        }
    }

}

---