For anyone who stumbles upon this years later (like I did), I tweaked 6502's methods a little bit to allow the progress bar to decrease as well as increase. Useful in slightly more cases. Thanks 6502 for a great tool!
Basically, the only difference is that the whole line of #s and -s is written each time progress(x) is called, and the cursor is always returned to the start of the bar.
def startprogress(title):
"""Creates a progress bar 40 chars long on the console
and moves cursor back to beginning with BS character"""
global progress_x
sys.stdout.write(title + ": [" + "-" * 40 + "]" + chr(8) * 41)
sys.stdout.flush()
progress_x = 0
def progress(x):
"""Sets progress bar to a certain percentage x.
Progress is given as whole percentage, i.e. 50% done
is given by x = 50"""
global progress_x
x = int(x * 40 // 100)
sys.stdout.write("#" * x + "-" * (40 - x) + "]" + chr(8) * 41)
sys.stdout.flush()
progress_x = x
def endprogress():
"""End of progress bar;
Write full bar, then move to next line"""
sys.stdout.write("#" * 40 + "]\n")
sys.stdout.flush()