Easy pause for console

I needed an easy way to pause my long running console application, and resume it at will. It turns out that doing so is pretty trivial, but it was a fun exercise that I wanted to share.

class Program

    {

        public static int s_nCounter = 0;



        static void Main(string[] args)

        {

            while (true)

            {

                CheckForPause();

                DoMyWork();

            }

        }



        private static void CheckForPause()

        {

            if (Console.KeyAvailable)

            {

                ConsoleKeyInfo key = Console.ReadKey(true);

                Console.WriteLine();

                Console.WriteLine("Program execution paused. Press any key to continue");

                Console.WriteLine();

                WaitForResume();

            }

        }



        static void WaitForResume()

        {

            while (!Console.KeyAvailable)

            {

                Thread.Sleep(1000);

            }

            ConsoleKeyInfo key = Console.ReadKey(true);

        }

   



        static void DoMyWork()

        {

            Console.CursorLeft = 0;

            Console.Write(s_nCounter++);

            Thread.Sleep(1000);

        }

    }

This is the example console app that continually writes a incrementing counter to the screen. At any time you can press any key. This key is stored in the input stream. The next time CheckForPause() is called, it looks at that stream to see if there's data waiting to be read. If so, it first consumes that key (ConsoleKeyInfo key = Console.ReadKey(true)), prints a message telling you it's paused, and then goes into an infinite loop waiting for another key press to resume progress. Note that you could easily read the key variable to determine which key was pressed, and make some branching decision based on that as well.