Creating a progress bar in a CLI application

Question

When using tools like bzr, doxygen and scp or wget, I see that all of them have a nice progress bar that looks like this:

|=============>---------| 55% ETA 3:30

I tried writing something like that in C++ using the \b character as many times as I had written something out before. The output was flickering pretty badly and did not look nearly as smooth as the mentioned tools do.

How can I create such a progress bar (or at least change the displayed ETA) with Python smoothly?

Answer 1

Use "\r" to send the cursor to the beginning of the line. Reprint no more than 2-3 times per second to avoid flickering.