Anyone know if there is an easy way to show either a cartwheel such as a stationary but transitioning ( / - \ | / - \ | ) in a DOS Shell Window or blinking text like <> in a batch file.

MANY... Years ago I USED GW-Basic and use the BLINK Color attribute to show blinking text and do the cartwheel with a print statement with Clear Screen to show say 10 flashes of / then 10 flashes of - then 10 flashes of \ then 10 of | and back around in a for loop. The process that it was EXECUTING was also WITHIN that for loop so it added to the time that it took to execute the process, but it worked. And since the process didnt take that long to execute anyways it wasnt painful to the user. This was however to add this bell and whistle sort of speak a way to lag down the program, but the end users loved seeing that cartwheel to know it was doing something at the sacrifice of having to wait longer to get the end result ( they didnt know that...ha ha )

Anyways in batch I was wondering if anyone found a neat way to make a cartwheel or blinking text within a loop so that another process the pure reason for the batch is able to execute and the cartwheel or blinking text is able to FUNCTION in harmony in the same batch.

I did make a way for this to happen in windows by a macro that triggered the batch the work to be done and then the visual effect batch which tested the state of the batch doing to work to TEST a file for a value of 1. If the value read in was still set to 1 in the token.txt file then the cartwheel started again until the value read in from token.txt was 0 changed by the batch getting to the end of its process and writing 0 to the token.txt file. And because this visual effect was triggered after the batch it was located on top of the true batch process window, to the user they were able to see that something was happening and the true process was underneith that DOS shell window.

Anyone know of a way to do it in native DOS or a single DOS Shell Window?I'd suggest ANSI commands, but they don't work with the NT shell.


you could, however, echo out a backspace character and write the next piece of the loop. I've gotten it working in some of my C programs.

Backspace is character code 8Quote from: BC_Programmer on January 16, 2009, 10:30:20 PM

I'd suggest ANSI commands, but they don't work with the NT shell.


you could, however, echo out a backspace character and write the next piece of the loop. I've gotten it working in some of my C programs.

Backspace is character code 8