What Is Backslash R?

\r is a carriage return character; it tells your terminal emulator to move the cursor at the start of the line. The cursor is the position where the next characters will be rendered.

What does \r and \n mean?

They're "carriage return" and "line feed" respectively. Typically on Windows, you need both together to represent a line terminator: "\r\n" whereas on most (all?) ... \n is a newline and \r is a carriage return.

What does '\ r mean in C?

'\r' is the carriage return character. ... When writing to an interactive terminal on stdout or stderr , '\r' can be used to move the cursor back to the beginning of the line, to overwrite it with new contents. This makes a nice primitive progress indicator.