How to create a spinning command line cursor?

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

chars = '|/-\\'

for i in xrange(1,1000):
    for c in chars:
        sys.stdout.write(c)
        sys.stdout.write('\b')
        sys.stdout.flush()

CAVEATS: In my experience this doesn't work in all terminals. A more robust way to do this under Unix/Linux, be it more complicated is to use the curses module, which doesn't work under Windows. You probably want to slow it down some how with actual processing that is going on in the background.