Printing an ASCII spinning “cursor” in the console

Question

I have a Ruby script that does some long taking jobs. It is command-line only and I would like to show that the script is still running and not halted. I used to like the so

Answer 1

# First define your chars
pinwheel = %w{| / - \\}

# Rotate and print as often as needed to "spin"
def spin_it
  print "\b" + pinwheel.rotate!.first
end

EDIT from peter: here a working version

def spin_it(times)
  pinwheel = %w{| / - \\}
  times.times do
    print "\b" + pinwheel.rotate!.first
    sleep(0.1)
  end
end

spin_it 10