Summary: Use a Windows PowerShell function to truly mimic legacy commands.  Hey, Scripting Guy! What happened to “pause” in Windows PowerShell? Am I simply not recognizing it? —KL  Hello KL, Honorary Scripting Guy, Sean Kearney, here. I’m again filling in for our good friend, Ed. He stepped away from his keyboard for a few minutes, so I’m quickly typing…shhhhhh! Let’s “pause” for a moment… In the old console world, we had a little friend called Pause. We used to do this when we wanted to wait for a key press to continue a script:

PAUSE And then we got a response:

Press any key to continue… Afterwards there was a massive panic as keyboards across the planet were replaced due to a severe lack of “Any Key” buttons. The world entered a panic. Label makers and stickers with the words “Any Key” were produced to sooth the population. Anarchy reigned supreme! Well, no it didn’t. But we used to have a command called Pause. We don’t seem to have it in Windows PowerShell…at least, it is not obvious. There have been many great people before me that showed how to introduce a Pause in a Windows PowerShell script. There is a simple point where you tap some key on the keyboard to continue with operations. We had a PowerTip a few weeks ago about how to do this:

$HOST.UI.RawUI.ReadKey(“NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown”) | OUT-NULL

$HOST.UI.RawUI.Flushinputbuffer() With that, a good friend popped in with an alternate:

Cmd /c pause Now I know that you all just love to type, type, type—it’s indescribably delightful. But I like to function afterwards—and sometimes beforewards. Oh, right. We could make a function and add it to our profile, maybe call it Invoke-Pause:

Function INVOKE-PAUSE() {

$HOST.UI.RawUI.ReadKey(“NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown”) | OUT-NULL

$HOST.UI.RawUI.Flushinputbuffer()

} Cool! Now I can pause whenever I want to by adding this to my script:

INVOKE-PAUSE Almost like the old ways. But what happens if I don’t tell the user? Confusion! Upset people! And calls to the Help Desk! We wouldn’t want that, would we? So now we’ll expand and add some features. Let’s put in a little something that says, “If we say nothing, display a little message.” So we’ll add some simple parameters to our function. Let’s have a simple message that will default to our good old friend from CMD days:

$Content=”Press any key to continue . . .” And then something to determine whether we should display a message:

$DisplayMessage=$TRUE So with these additions, our function will look like this:

Function INVOKE-PAUSE() {

Param(

$DisplayMessage=$TRUE,

$Content=”Press any key to continue . . .”

)

If ($DisplayMessage) { WRITE-HOST $Message }

$HOST.UI.RawUI.ReadKey(“NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown”) | OUT-NULL

$HOST.UI.RawUI.Flushinputbuffer()

} So now, after executing the function, we can do this:

SET-PAUSE Which will respond with the classic phrase “Press any key to continue . . .” But we can now do this:

SET-PAUSE –DisplayMessage $FALSE Or we can do this:

SET-PAUSE –Content “Smack the keyboard quickly to continue with what we’re doing” Of course, after you have this function defined, you add a friendly alias that makes the world more familiar:

NEW-Alias Pause Invoke-pause Now things seem a little more familiar when you try to “pause” for a moment.

Pause So there you have it, KL. With a little bit of effort we can rebuild almost anything in Windows PowerShell. Now wait for it…

PAUSE –Content “Await Applause” –DisplayMessage $TRUE I invite you to follow the Scripting Guys on Twitter and Facebook. If you have any questions, send email to scripter@microsoft.com, or post your questions on the Official Scripting Guys Forum. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace. Sean Kearney,
Honorary Scripting Guy and Windows PowerShell MVP