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

Another option is to simply print one character at a time. Typically, stdout is line buffered, so you'll need to call fflush(stdout) --

for(int i = 0; i < 50; ++i) {
   putchar('X'); fflush(stdout);
   /* do some stuff here */
}
putchar('\n');

But this doesn't have the nice terminating "]" that indicates completion.