Display Spinner while waiting for some process to finish

Have your while loop watch for your real command to exit. I'll assume a Linux environment that has /proc entries for each PID, but you could slice it other ways:

#!/bin/bash
# your real command here, instead of sleep
sleep 7 &
PID=$!
i=1
sp="/-\|"
echo -n ' '
while [ -d /proc/$PID ]
do
  printf "\b${sp:i++%${#sp}:1}"
done

This shell script should do what you're looking for:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

show_spinner()
{
  local -r pid="${1}"
  local -r delay='0.75'
  local spinstr='\|/-'
  local temp
  while ps a | awk '{print $1}' | grep -q "${pid}"; do
    temp="${spinstr#?}"
    printf " [%c]  " "${spinstr}"
    spinstr=${temp}${spinstr%"${temp}"}
    sleep "${delay}"
    printf "\b\b\b\b\b\b"
  done
  printf "    \b\b\b\b"
}

("$@") &
show_spinner "$!"

Assuming you store the shell script in a file named spinner, you can invoke it like this to display a spinner while the command sleep 10 is running:

$ spinner sleep 10

Here's another fancy spinner which you can use like this:

spinner ping google.com
echo "ping exited with exit code $?"

spinner sleep 10
echo "sleep exited with exit code $?"

It has 12 themes and picks one randomly.

#!/bin/bash
# Shows a spinner while another command is running. Randomly picks one of 12 spinner styles.
# @args command to run (with any parameters) while showing a spinner. 
#       E.g. ‹spinner sleep 10›

function shutdown() {
  tput cnorm # reset cursor
}
trap shutdown EXIT

function cursorBack() {
  echo -en "\033[$1D"
}

function spinner() {
  # make sure we use non-unicode character type locale 
  # (that way it works for any locale as long as the font supports the characters)
  local LC_CTYPE=C

  local pid=$1 # Process Id of the previous running command

  case $(($RANDOM % 12)) in
  0)
    local spin='⠁⠂⠄⡀⢀⠠⠐⠈'
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  1)
    local spin='-\|/'
    local charwidth=1
    ;;
  2)
    local spin="▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█▇▆▅▄▃▂▁"
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  3)
    local spin="▉▊▋▌▍▎▏▎▍▌▋▊▉"
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  4)
    local spin='←↖↑↗→↘↓↙'
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  5)
    local spin='▖▘▝▗'
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  6)
    local spin='┤┘┴└├┌┬┐'
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  7)
    local spin='◢◣◤◥'
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  8)
    local spin='◰◳◲◱'
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  9)
    local spin='◴◷◶◵'
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  10)
    local spin='◐◓◑◒'
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  11)
    local spin='⣾⣽⣻⢿⡿⣟⣯⣷'
    local charwidth=3
    ;;
  esac

  local i=0
  tput civis # cursor invisible
  while kill -0 $pid 2>/dev/null; do
    local i=$(((i + $charwidth) % ${#spin}))
    printf "%s" "${spin:$i:$charwidth}"

    cursorBack 1
    sleep .1
  done
  tput cnorm
  wait $pid # capture exit code
  return $?
}

("$@") &

spinner $!