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Periodically I notice PowerShell seems to take forever to finish doing whatever it is I told it to do until it occurs to me to "wake it up" by pressing enter. This is not the fault of any one process as best I can tell, as I have even run custom apps that just log their output to the screen every few seconds and even in these cases, PowerShell will stop doing anything after a while until I "give it a kick" by pressing enter.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

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  • Wow! This also applies to the new (silently installed) windows console! Commented Sep 5, 2019 at 17:58
  • Happens in the Ubunto On Windows console as well. Commented May 31, 2020 at 22:44

2 Answers 2

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If the QuickEdit Mode and\or Insert options are checked within the console\window properties, and you click within the console, it will pause the output. If those options are not checked, the output can't be paused by clicking within the console.

alt text To get to these settings, right-click on the PowerShell-Logo in the top-left of your terminal window, then select 'Properties' (at least that's one way to do it)

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  • 12
    Ah, yes, it never occurred to me that clicking the screen could interrupt the output. After running some tests, this indeed seems to be the issue. Commented Nov 25, 2010 at 14:37
  • 13
    OMG Shell fail. Commented Nov 24, 2014 at 20:41
  • 25
    That is extremely annoying :) Another undocumented feature? Commented Mar 3, 2015 at 23:44
  • 13
    literally joined server fault to upvote, been years since i observed it first time, but it never became problem big enough to look into, until today i stepped on this 'rake' again :) Commented Aug 14, 2015 at 13:16
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    Like drk, I joined this site to upvote :D. This solved one of the most annoying mysteries in my life lol. Commented Apr 7, 2017 at 12:09
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If you are running PowerShell script from within Cygwin like so:

powershell.exe -Command '<...>' 

and you get this problem, you can fix it by piping in a newline:

echo | powershell.exe -Command '<...>' 

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