TIMEOUT - Delay that allows the user to press a key and continue immediately. “Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it” - Stephen Leacock PAUSE does not set or clear the Errorlevel. The limitation is that this only acts like PAUSE at the very end of a script.

As Lekensteyn stated in the comment above it seems this has been the case since 12.04.4. The advantage of CMD /K is that you can then run the same script in 'unattended mode' without having to edit it. read -p 'Press any key to continue or CTRL-C to abort' works fine under 14.04 in my scripts. That will run the script and the window will remain open for any further input. When /bin/bash is at the top of the script, -n1 will work and will wait for any key. The script will wait for the user’s input in every 3 seconds and if the user doesn’t press any key then it will print the message, waiting for the keypress. read -r -p 'Press any key to continue.' key waits for the Return key, no matter if /bin/bash has been used or not.

Pause is often used at the end of a script to give the user time to read some output text.Īn alternative to this is to run the script using CMD /K: When you will run the script, it will continue until the user presses any key. Pressing any key will resume the operation. 'Įxecution of a batch script can also be paused by pressing CTRL-S (or the Pause|Break key) on the keyboard, this also works for pausing a single command such as a long DIR /s listing.

Pause the execution of a batch file Syntaxĭisplays the message 'Press any key to continue.

Bash press any key to continue