Customized progress message for tasks in bash script

Just to put the editorial hat on, what if something goes wrong? How are you, or a user of your script going to know what went wrong? This is probably not the answer you're looking for but having your script just execute each build step individually may turn out to be better overall, especially for troubleshooting. Why not define a function to validate your build steps:

function validateCmd()
{
  CODE=$1
  COMMAND=$2
  MODULE=$3

  if [ ${CODE} -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "ERROR Executing Command: \"${COMMAND}\" in Module: ${MODULE}"
    echo "Exiting."
    exit 1;
  fi
}    

./configure
validateCmd $? "./configure" "Configuration of something"

Anyways, yes as you probably noticed above, use $? to determine what the result of the last command was. For example:

rm -rf ${TMP_DIR}

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
  echo "ERROR Removing directory: ${TMP_DIR}"
  exit 1;
fi

To answer your first question, you can use:

echo -ne "\b"

To delete a character on the same line. So to count to ten on one line, you can do something like:

for i in $(seq -w 1 10); do
  echo -en "\b\b${i}"
  sleep .25
done
echo

The trick with that is you'll have to know how much to delete, but I'm sure you can figure that out.

You cannot call exec like that; exec never returns, and the lines after an exec will not execute. The standard way to print progress updates on a single line is to simply use \r instead of \n at the end of each line. For example:

#!/bin/bash

i=0
sleep 5 &   # Start some command
pid=$!      # Save the pid of the command
while sleep 1; do    # Produce progress reports
    printf '\rcontinuing in %d seconds...' $(( 5 - ++i ))
    test $i -eq 5 && break
done
if wait $pid; then echo done; else echo failed; fi

Here's another example:

#!/bin/bash

execute() {
    eval "$@" &  # Execute the command
    pid=$!

    # Invoke a shell to print status.  If you just invoke
    # the while loop directly, killing it will generate a
    # notification.  By trapping SIGTERM, we suppress the notice.
    sh -c 'trap exit SIGTERM
    while printf "\r%3d:%s..." $((++i)) "$*"; do sleep 1
    done' 0 "$@" &
    last_report=$!
    if wait $pid; then echo done; else echo failed; fi
    kill $last_report
}
execute sleep 3
execute sleep 2 \| false   # Execute a command that will fail
execute sleep 1