How to distinguish between Enter and Escape key presses in interactive bat / cmd Windows scripts (cmd.exe)?
The Pause command exits on the Enter and Exit keys, but does not return the distinguished ErrorLevel parameter.
Choice does not return when you press any of the Enter or Escape keys.
I found this question interesting and wanted to add another possible solution, powershell ReadKey
Command
PowerShell Exit($host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey('NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown').VirtualKeyCode);
Using
@echo off
set /p "=> Single Key Prompt? " <nul
PowerShell Exit($host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey('NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown').VirtualKeyCode);
echo KeyCode = %ErrorLevel%
Output: enter key
> Single Key Prompt? KeyCode = 13
Output: Escape Key
> Single Key Prompt? KeyCode = 27
TechNet
Links
PS Pause Alternative
To detect ENTER you can use XCOPY, really ...
But detecting a single ESC seems impossible with a clean batch.
setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion
call :GetKey
if "!key!"=="" echo ENTER
if "!key!"==" " echo SPACE
exit /b
:GetKey
set "key="
for /F "usebackq delims=" %%L in (`xcopy /L /w "%~f0" "%~f0" 2^>NUL`) do (
if not defined key set "key=%%L"
)
set "key=%key:~-1%"
exit /b
This works as it xcopy /L /W
asks for a key press to start copying and then shows the key and ends.
You can do this using select32.exe ( http://www.westmesatech.com/editv.html ):
choose32 -c ^A^[ -d ^A -q -n -p "ESC to quit, ENTER to continue: "
^ A - Ctrl + A (ASCII character 1) and ^ [- Ctrl + [(ASCII character 27 or Esc). Breakout command line:
- -c specifies which keys are valid (in this case Ctrl + A and Esc).
- -d specifies which choice to use if you press Enter (default choice).
- -n hides the list of options.
- -q does not display keystrokes.
- -p Specifies the prompt to display.
In this case, select32 returns exit code 2 if Esc was pressed, or exit code 1 if Enter was pressed.