Waiting for user input with a timeout

Question

I have searched but apparently my google foo is weak. What I need is a way to prompt for user input in the console and have the request time out after a period of time and c

Answer 1

It's quite old now but how I solved it based on the same KeyAvailable method is here:

https://gist.github.com/nathanchere/704920a4a43f06f4f0d2

It waits for x seconds, displaying a . for each second that elapses up to the maximum wait time. If a key is pressed it returns $true, otherwise $false.

Function TimedPrompt($prompt,$secondsToWait){   
    Write-Host -NoNewline $prompt
    $secondsCounter = 0
    $subCounter = 0
    While ( (!$host.ui.rawui.KeyAvailable) -and ($count -lt $secondsToWait) ){
        start-sleep -m 10
        $subCounter = $subCounter + 10
        if($subCounter -eq 1000)
        {
            $secondsCounter++
            $subCounter = 0
            Write-Host -NoNewline "."
        }       
        If ($secondsCounter -eq $secondsToWait) { 
            Write-Host "`r`n"
            return $false;
        }
    }
    Write-Host "`r`n"
    return $true;
}

And to use:

$val = TimedPrompt "Press key to cancel restore; will begin in 3 seconds" 3
Write-Host $val