How to animate the command line?

Question

I have always wondered how people update a previous line in a command line. a great example of this is when using the wget command in linux. It creates an ASCII loading bar

Answer 1

below is my answer,use the windows APIConsoles(Windows), coding of C.

/*
* file: ProgressBarConsole.cpp
* description: a console progress bar Demo
* author: lijian 
* version: 1.0
* date: 2012-12-06
*/
#include 
#include 

HANDLE hOut;
CONSOLE_SCREEN_BUFFER_INFO bInfo;
char charProgress[80] = 
    {"================================================================"};
char spaceProgress = ' ';

/*
* show a progress in the [row] line
* row start from 0 to the end
*/
int ProgressBar(char *task, int row, int progress)
{
    char str[100];
    int len, barLen,progressLen;
    COORD crStart, crCurr;
    GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo(hOut, &bInfo);
    crCurr = bInfo.dwCursorPosition; //the old position
    len = bInfo.dwMaximumWindowSize.X;
    barLen = len - 17;//minus the extra char
    progressLen = (int)((progress/100.0)*barLen);
    crStart.X = 0;
    crStart.Y = row;

    sprintf(str,"%-10s[%-.*s>%*c]%3d%%", task,progressLen,charProgress, barLen-progressLen,spaceProgress,50);
#if 0 //use stdand libary
    SetConsoleCursorPosition(hOut, crStart);
    printf("%s\n", str);
#else
    WriteConsoleOutputCharacter(hOut, str, len,crStart,NULL);
#endif
    SetConsoleCursorPosition(hOut, crCurr);
    return 0;
}
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    int i;
    hOut = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
    GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo(hOut, &bInfo);

    for (i=0;i<100;i++)
    {
        ProgressBar("test", 0, i);
        Sleep(50);
    }

    return 0;
}