How to overwrite a printed line in the shell with Ruby?

Question

How would I overwrite the previously printed line in a Unix shell with Ruby?

Say I\'d like to output the current time on a shell every second, but instead of stackin

Answer 1

You can use the \r escape sequence at the end of the line (the next line will overwrite this line). Following your example:

require 'time'

loop do
  time = Time.now.to_s + "\r"
  print time
  $stdout.flush
  sleep 1
end