{"id":2786,"date":"2013-10-01T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2013\/10\/01\/rebuild-the-pause-command-with-powershell\/"},"modified":"2013-10-01T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-01T00:01:00","slug":"rebuild-the-pause-command-with-powershell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/rebuild-the-pause-command-with-powershell\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebuild the Pause Command with PowerShell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/strong>: Use a Windows PowerShell function to truly mimic legacy commands.\n\"Hey, Hey, Scripting Guy!\nWhat happened to “pause” in Windows PowerShell? Am I simply not recognizing it?\n—KL\n\"Hey, Hello KL,\nHonorary 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!\nLet’s “pause” for a moment…\nIn the old console world, we had a little friend called Pause<\/strong>. We used to do this when we wanted to wait for a key press to continue a script:<\/p>\n

PAUSE\nAnd then we got a response:<\/p>\n

Press any key to continue…\nAfterwards 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!\nWell, no it didn’t. But we used to have a command called Pause<\/strong>. We don’t seem to have it in Windows PowerShell…at least, it is not obvious.\nThere have been many great people before me that showed how to introduce a Pause<\/strong> in a Windows PowerShell script. There is a simple point where you tap some key on the keyboard to continue with operations.\nWe had a PowerTip a few weeks ago about how to do this:<\/p>\n

$HOST.UI.RawUI.ReadKey(“NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown”) | OUT-NULL<\/p>\n

$HOST.UI.RawUI.Flushinputbuffer()\nWith that, a good friend popped in with an alternate:<\/p>\n

Cmd \/c pause\nNow 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<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Function INVOKE-PAUSE() {<\/p>\n

$HOST.UI.RawUI.ReadKey(“NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown”) | OUT-NULL<\/p>\n

$HOST.UI.RawUI.Flushinputbuffer()<\/p>\n

}\nCool! Now I can pause whenever I want to by adding this to my script:<\/p>\n

INVOKE-PAUSE\nAlmost like the old ways.\nBut what happens if I don’t tell the user? Confusion! Upset people! And calls to the Help Desk!\nWe wouldn’t want that, would we?\nSo 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:<\/p>\n

$Content=”Press any key to continue . . .”\nAnd then something to determine whether we should display a message:<\/p>\n

$DisplayMessage=$TRUE\nSo with these additions, our function will look like this:<\/p>\n

Function INVOKE-PAUSE() {<\/p>\n

Param(<\/p>\n

$DisplayMessage=$TRUE,<\/p>\n

$Content=”Press any key to continue . . .”<\/p>\n

)<\/p>\n

If ($DisplayMessage) { WRITE-HOST $Message }<\/p>\n

$HOST.UI.RawUI.ReadKey(“NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown”) | OUT-NULL<\/p>\n

$HOST.UI.RawUI.Flushinputbuffer()<\/p>\n

}\nSo now, after executing the function, we can do this:<\/p>\n

SET-PAUSE\nWhich will respond with the classic phrase “Press any key to continue . . .”\nBut we can now do this:<\/p>\n

SET-PAUSE –DisplayMessage $FALSE\nOr we can do this:<\/p>\n

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

NEW-Alias Pause Invoke-pause\nNow things seem a little more familiar when you try to “pause” for a moment.<\/p>\n

Pause\nSo there you have it, KL. With a little bit of effort we can rebuild almost anything in Windows PowerShell. Now wait for it…<\/p>\n

PAUSE –Content “Await Applause” –DisplayMessage $TRUE\nI invite you to follow the Scripting Guys on Twitter<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>. If you have any questions, send email to scripter@microsoft.com<\/a>, or post your questions on the Official Scripting Guys Forum<\/a>. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace.\nSean Kearney,
<\/strong>Honorary Scripting Guy and <\/strong>Windows PowerShell MVP<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":596,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[56,154,61,45],"class_list":["post-2786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-guest-blogger","tag-sean-kearney","tag-weekend-scripter","tag-windows-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/596"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}