Question

What is the best way to keep a console application open as long as the CancelKeyPress event has not been fired?

I would prefer to not use Console.Read or Console.ReadLine as I do not want to accept input. I just want to enable the underlying application to print to the console event details as they are fired. Then once the CancelKeyPress event is fired I want to gracefully shut down the application.

Answer 1

I’m assuming that ‘gracefully shut down the application’ is the part you are struggling with here. Otherwise your application will automatically exit on ctrl-c. You should change the title.

Here’s a quick demo of what I think you need. It could be refined a bit more with use of locking and Monitors for notification. I’m not sure exactly what you need though, so I’ll just pose this…

class Program {      private static volatile bool _s_stop = false;      public static void Main(string[] args)     {         Console.CancelKeyPress += new ConsoleCancelEventHandler(Console_CancelKeyPress);         while (!_s_stop)         {             /* put real logic here */             Console.WriteLine('still running at {0}', DateTime.Now);             Thread.Sleep(3000);         }         Console.WriteLine('Graceful shut down code here...');          //don't leave this...  demonstration purposes only...         Console.ReadLine();     }      static void Console_CancelKeyPress(object sender, ConsoleCancelEventArgs e)     {         //you have 2 options here, leave e.Cancel set to false and just handle any         //graceful shutdown that you can while in here, or set a flag to notify the other         //thread at the next check that it's to shut down.  I'll do the 2nd option         e.Cancel = true;         _s_stop = true;         Console.WriteLine('CancelKeyPress fired...');     }  } 

The _s_stop boolean should be declared volatile or an overly-ambitious optimizer might cause the program to loop infinitely.