The key was to realize that the ReadKey() function takes Options.

Of course you can see me pressing a key but go ahead and use this function and see for yourself. PS> pause “Press any key to win a million dollars…” Then ctrl-z to stop and you will see the second command is not executed until the first has finished. You can also start other processesscripts and stop them with ctrl - z. It is now in the porcess state T, stopped). One of the most common ways to pause a script is to use the Read-Host command like this: Read-Host -Prompt 'Press enter to continue'. For example, to represent the letter A, pass in the string A to the method. The terminal is released again and your see a message that the process is stopped. Such a simple thing really, but so handy if you want to pause somewhere in a script to read some sort of output before continuing.

To specify a single keyboard character, use the character itself. $null = $Host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey(“NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown”) Each key is represented by one or more characters. According to Microsofts documentation, read-host lets the user type some input, and then press enter to continue.

There were lots of good answers that came close but I think the one below comes the closest (and a little bit better).įunction Pause ($Message=”Press any key to continue…”) In the Newsgroup, BJ Stigall asked what the equivalent of the batch file PAUSE function was in PowerShell.

Powershell press any key to continue