When you do this in C, you're usually using a terminal control library,
such as Curses (
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_%28programming_library%29)

   There's no cross-platform way to do this in Java, because some platforms
that Java runs on doesn't support erasing an already printed line (think
mainframes with no screens, but with line-printer outputs).

   If you don't care about those platforms, you can use JNI to interface
with Curses (or any other library)from within Java.

   - Oliver

As long as you stay on the same line (no linefeed), most terminals
support \r to go back to the start of the line.

 for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
   System.out.print("this is line " + i + "\r");
 }
 System.out.println();

/gordon