forcing immediate output of a subroutine

I wanted to do something fancy for the user when they run my script
from the command line. Basically, I wrote this subroutine so that it
would output what would appear to be a spinning cursor while the
script was running.

##start of Fancy subroutine
sub Fancy
{
$FlashIndex = shift;
++$FlashIndex;

if ($FlashIndex == 1) { $StatusLine = " \\"; }
elsif ($FlashIndex == 2) { $StatusLine = " \|"; }
elsif ($FlashIndex == 3) { $StatusLine = " \/"; }
else { $StatusLine = " \-"; $FlashIndex = 0;}

$StatusLen = length($StatusLine);
print "$StatusLine";
print "\b" x $StatusLen;
}
##end of Fancy subroutine

$FlashIndex and $StatusLine are scoped globally, and each time the
function is called, $FlashIndex is passed to the function. The output
should be what appears to be a spinning cursor made up of \,|,/, and
-.

The problem is that the print statement executes at the end of the
script, not during, so I don't get a spinning cursor until the end of
the program. Is this because I am executing it in a subroutine? Is
there something about subroutines that prevents output from being
generated until program termination?

Thanks in advance.

.

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