How to perform keystroke inside powershell?

by

If I understand correctly, you want PowerShell to send the ENTER keystroke to some interactive application?

$wshell = New-Object -ComObject wscript.shell;
$wshell.AppActivate('title of the application window')
Sleep 1
$wshell.SendKeys('~')

If that interactive application is a PowerShell script, just use whatever is in the title bar of the PowerShell window as the argument to AppActivate (by default, the path to powershell.exe). To avoid ambiguity, you can have your script retitle its own window by using the title 'new window title' command.

A few notes:

  • The tilde (~) represents the ENTER keystroke. You can also use {ENTER}, though they’re not identical – that’s the keypad’s ENTER key. A complete list is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa202943%28v=office.10%29.aspx.
  • The reason for the Sleep 1 statement is to wait 1 second because it takes a moment for the window to activate, and if you invoke SendKeys immediately, it’ll send the keys to the PowerShell window, or to nowhere.
  • Be aware that this can be tripped up, if you type anything or click the mouse during the second that it’s waiting, preventing to window you activate with AppActivate from being active. You can experiment with reducing the amount of time to find the minimum that’s reliably sufficient on your system (Sleep accepts decimals, so you could try .5 for half a second). I find that on my 2.6 GHz Core i7 Win7 laptop, anything less than .8 seconds has a significant failure rate. I use 1 second to be safe.
  • IMPORTANT WARNING: Be extra careful if you’re using this method to send a password, because activating a different window between invoking AppActivate and invoking SendKeys will cause the password to be sent to that different window in plain text!

Sometimes wscript.shell‘s SendKeys method can be a little quirky, so if you run into problems, replace the fourth line above with this:

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
[System.Windows.Forms.SendKeys]::SendWait('~');

Leave a Comment