How to update a printed message in terminal without reprinting

Question

I want to make a progress bar for my terminal application that would work something like:

 [XXXXXXX       ] 

which would give a visual indi

Answer 1

'\r' will perform a carriage return. Imagine a printer doing a carriage return without a linefeed ('\n'). This will return the writing point back to the start of the line... then reprint your updated status on top of the original line.