Powershell -WindowStyle Hidden still shows a window briefly

[Ciantic]

Steps to reproduce

In Windows Run dialog type this:
PowerShell.exe -WindowStyle Hidden -Command ping www.microsoft.com

Expected behavior

There should be no window, right now you can't start powershell without window flashing, making it rather useless e.g. for scheduled tasks.

Note I think this is intended behavior, but it's confusing and new option is probably required. If you search how to run a powershell in scheduled task, the go-to workaround is to do a vbs script of all things! Such as:

Dim shell,command
command = "powershell.exe -nologo -File D:\myscript.ps1"
Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
shell.Run command,0

This is not a good thing, powershell needs this feature in the shell itself, scheduled tasks are important feature and having a window flash on scheduled task is a really bad experience.

Actual behavior

It flashes the powershell window briefly.

Environment data

> $PSVersionTable
Name                           Value
----                           -----
PSVersion                      5.1.14393.693
PSEdition                      Desktop
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}
BuildVersion                   10.0.14393.693
CLRVersion                     4.0.30319.42000
WSManStackVersion              3.0
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1

[BrucePay]

powershell.exe is a console application. The console window is automatically created by the OS when the process starts. The powershell.exe code that processes -WindowStyle Hidden is therefore executed after the console window is opened hence the flash. To fix this, we would need the equivalent of wscript i.e. a win32 host application instead of a console host application. 

[SteveL-MSFT]

Given there's no code change we can do in powershell.exe to address this, I've changed this issue to a feature request to have a wscript-like host to support this type of scenario

http://www.f2ko.de/en/p2e.php
and Power Shell Studio has a custom host too

[rednoah]

You could have a powershellw.exe which would be a GUI application that doesn't show a console window. Same as what javaw.exe and pythonw.exe do.

[Jackbennett]

Can pwsh.exe get support for this or get pwshw.exe as suggested above? With this pwsh exe being new it seems like a great time to change the behaviour of -windowstyle hidden. Nobody has ever used hidden and thought "yep that's what I wanted, flash some screen for a second".

It makes sense that powershell.exe can't be changed after all this time and its legacy.

[SteveL-MSFT]

I would support a community contribution to add pwshw.exe

[gtalton]

Agree .. this would be consistant with other language executables and solve me having to currently wrap my powershell scripts in vbs scripts.

[iSazonov]

Technically we could do like https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/wiki/Hide-console-window-for-self-contained-.NET-Core-application

editbin.exe /subsystem:windows yourapp.exe

But I wonder - if PowerShell Core is portable what is expected behavior on Unix? Can we be unified on all platforms?
Related discussion https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/296 It also mentions that we could use GUI subsystem.

Maybe @mklement0 have any thoughts?