Changing Pause Message

Question

Ok, so you know how when you type up pause in CMD, it will say 'Press any key to continue...'. How do I change that to say something like 'Press a key to proceed...'?

Lastly, I was coding a batch file. I want to know what's up if I have something like:

@echo off
cls
pause
pause
pause
pause

It seems to skip round about to pauses When you press a key. I'm curious as to know the rules of which the pauses are skipped. Thanks.

I cannot reproduce the skipped PAUSE behavior. It always pauses 4 times, waiting for 4 key presses, as expected. — dbenham, Mar 11 '15 at 13:44

dbenham · Answer 1 · 2014-07-06T12:43:47.593

11

Nearly the same as Deniz Zoeteman, except this version displays the blinking cursor on the same line as your custom message, as does the normal PAUSE command. The Deniz Zoeteman solution displays the blinking cursor below your message.

<nul set /p "=Press a key to proceed..."
pause >nul

edited Jul 06 '14 at 12:43

answered Jul 09 '13 at 23:37

dbenham

127,446
28
251
390

Make sure to set the answer to the accepted answer if this is the thing you need :) – Deniz Zoeteman Jul 10 '13 at 09:23

Deniz Zoeteman · Answer 2 · 2013-07-09T23:18:34.400

You cannot change the text displayed when a pause command is executed. It's bound to the Windows installation's language pack. The only thing you can do is not letting it say anything by doing pause>nul. Of course, there's different ways to simulate pause; see the example from the other answer, where set /p is used. With pause>nul however, you can do this:

echo Custom pause message

pause>nul

And that should work.

And for pause commands skipping, that's most likely due to the key still being pressed down while the next pause command already executed (small guess though - I don't recall exactly if that's the behaviour of the command).

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 09 '13 at 23:12

1

You may want to try

set /p=your message

Note: you will have to hit the enter key to continue versus any key.

answered Jul 09 '13 at 23:12

R Dub

678
6
23

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 26 '14 at 00:58

1

Option #1:

@echo off

echo Press any key to continue or Ctrl-C to abort.

pause > nul

Option #2

set /p=Press any key to continue or Ctrl-C to abort.

-->> I prefer the screen output of option #1.

answered Sep 26 '14 at 00:58

code-me

11
1

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 25 '14 at 07:00

0

This is one practical application:

set /p=Press ENTER key to proceed or Ctrl-C to abort.

answered Sep 25 '14 at 07:00

code-me

11
1

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Jul 27 '23 at 10:48

A more personalised version could be

@color 04&timeout -1|set /p="Hello %userprofile:~9%, you may press a key to proceed..."&color

And you can mix that with a continuation

@color 04&echo/&timeout -1|set /p="Hello %userprofile:~9%, you may press a key to proceed..."&color&echo  Continuing with process...

Changing Pause Message

6 Answers6

Linked