Octave / CLI -- Keeping long outputs on the same console line

Question

I'm using algorithms that require some time to compute and if I print an output to be sure that the correct section of code is executing even writing a single . per iteration I end up with entire screens full of dots that cover up all previous outputs that I might have been interest in.

Is there a way to "send the cursor back" when sending output to the console line? Alternatively, is there a way to output a "rotating bar" on the console output for the time required to execute a program from point A to point B?

What I'm looking for is to write the following, where each of these lines would appear on the same line in sequence:

Processing
Processing .
Processing ..
Pricessing ...
Processing
Processing .
Processing ..

Answer 1

You can print backspace characters (\b) which will move the cursor backwards. Seems like it may overwrite previous characters but on mine it doesn't. So something like this:

printf ("processing ");
for i = 1:3
  for i = 1:9
    printf (".");
    pause (0.1);
  endfor
  printf (repmat ("\b", 1, 9));
  printf (repmat (" ", 1, 9));
  printf (repmat ("\b", 1, 9));
endfor
printf ("\n");

Alternatively, you can install the Octave Forge miscellaneous package, there's the text_waitbar function:

pkg load miscellaneous;

text_waitbar (0, 70); # set length of waitbar
text_waitbar (0.0, "processing ");
for i = 1:3
  for i = 1:9
    text_waitbar (i/9, "processing");
    pause (0.1);
  endfor
endfor

which will look like this:

[############################################              ]   80%