I just pushed a small update to my WinHaste hastebin client (binary). Hastebin is a cool, minimal, login-free alternative to Pastebin. Now, when a command’s output is being piped to WinHaste, the output will be echoed to the console. This is especially handy if you are running an interactive command, so you aren’t entering values “blind.”

WinHaste supports piped or interactive entry - if you enter WinHaste.exe with no arguments, it will read user input from the console until an end-of-file ^Z character is entered. In this mode, Windows already writes user input to the console, so echoing within WinHaste would result in doubling every character typed. I ran across a nice technique in this StackOverflow answer for checking whether the current input stream is piped or interactive:

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private static bool IsInputPiped()
{
    try
    {
        var tmp = Console.KeyAvailable;
        return false;
    }
    catch (InvalidOperationException)
    {
        return true;
    }
}

I navigated into the disassembly of the Console.KeyAvailable (thanks, ReSharper!) found found the following:

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bool r = Win32Native.PeekConsoleInput(ConsoleInputHandle, out ir, 1, out numEventsRead);
if (!r) {
    int errorCode = Marshal.GetLastWin32Error();
    if (errorCode == Win32Native.ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE)
        throw new InvalidOperationException(Environment.GetResourceString("InvalidOperation_ConsoleKeyAvailableOnFile"));
    __Error.WinIOError(errorCode, "stdin");
}

So, I could P/Invoke PeekConsoleInput myself, but this works fine for me!