What is this thing?

progressbar is a C-class (it's a convention, dammit) for displaying attractive progress bars on the command line. It's heavily influenced by the ruby ProgressBar gem, whose api and behaviour it imitates.

Ok, what the hell is a C-class, and how do I use one?

progressbar is implemented in pure C99, but using a vaguely object-oriented convention.

Example usage:

progressbar *progress = progressbar_new("Loading",100);
for(int i=0;i<100;i++)
{
  // Do some stuff
  progressbar_inc(progress);
}
progressbar_finish(progress);

Example output (from progressbar_demo.c):

Additional examples can be found in test/progressbar_demo.c

Why did you do this?

One of the things I miss most when I'm writing C instead of Ruby is the how ridiculously easy it is to write user-friendly, informative CLI apps in Ruby. A big part of that, at least for me, is the ProgressBar gem -- and since most of the time when I'm writing C I'm doing so because I need a tool to handle some long-running, processor-intensive task, I'd really like to have a way of seeing at a glance how much time is remaining and how far along we've gotten. Enter progressbar!

Can I use it?

Of course, if you're so inclined. progressbar is licensed under a simplified BSD license, so feel free to take it and run with it. Details can be found in the LICENSE file.