[[!meta title="Using Term::Progressbar"]] I've been working for a while on analyzing a fairly large dataset for my Lupus genetics project. One of the major annoyances with analyzing large datasets is not knowing when a particular part of the analysis is going to finish, and whether I should go back and rewrite part of the code to be faster, or just wait for it to finish. In R, I've been using txtProgressBar to handle this, but I hadn't bothered to find a similar module for perl until now. Luckily, [Term::ProgressBar](http://search.cpan.org/dist/Term-ProgressBar/) exists, and is pretty easy to use: my $pos = $sfh->tell(); $sfh->seek(0,SEEK_END); my $p = Term::ProgressBar->new({count => $sfh->tell, remove => 1, ETA => 'linear'}); $sfh->seek($pos,SEEK_SET); while (<$sfh>) { ...; # yada yada yada $p->update($sfh->tell()); } producing useful output, which told me that my SQLite database creation routine would take about 2 days to finish instead of the 7 years that the slightly less optimal version wanted. [[!tag tech perl]]