Question

I’m trying to get a “live” progress indicator working on my php CLI app. Rather than outputting as

1Done
2Done
3Done

I would rather it cleared and just showed the latest result. system(“command \C CLS”) doesnt work. Nor does ob_flush(), flush() or anything else that I’ve found.

I’m running windows 7 64 bit ultimate, I noticed the command line outputs in real time, which was unexpected. Everyone warned me that out wouldn’t… but it does… a 64 bit perk?

Cheers for the help!

I want to avoid echoing 24 new lines if I can.

Answer 1

Try outputting a line of text and terminating it with “\r” instead of “\n”.

The “\n” character is a line-feed which goes to the next line, but “\r” is just a return that sends the cursor back to position 0 on the same line.

So you can:

echo "1Done\r";
echo "2Done\r";
echo "3Done\r";

etc.

Make sure to output some spaces before the “\r” to clear the previous contents of the line.

[Edit] Optional: Interested in some history & background? Wikipedia has good articles on “\n” (line feed) and “\r” (carriage return)