Send-VMKeystrokes

Module to facilitate sending keystrokes to a VMware virtual machine. Note that this module depends on PowerCLI being available.

Formatting Strings

This module uses similar formatting for control characters and special characters to the AutoIt Send function.

A string of just plain characters will be split up into a sequence of USB Keyboard HID Events and sent to the Virtual Machine.

Control Characters

The characters "!", "+", "^", and "#" have special meanings. By prefixing any of these characters you will modify the next key in the sequence.

Character	Modifier
!	ALT
+	SHIFT
^	CTRL
#	META (Windows/Apple Key)

Some examples:

Example	Sends Keys
^c	Ctrl + C
^!{DELETE}	Ctrl + Alt + Delete
!{F4}	Alt + F4

Special Characters

There are a number of keys on your keyboard that don't have a direct ASCII representation, to send those keys we use a HID map file. You can view that file, and see a list of available special keys here. Special characters should be enclosed in curly braces (i.e. DELETE should be {DELETE} in your string).

Escaping Characters

If you need to type any of the control characters or a literal curly brace you can wrap the character in curly braces. For example {+} is "+", {{} is "{", etc...

Usage Examples

Sending a string of keypresses

$VM | Send-VMKeystrokes 'hello world'

Sending Ctrl+Alt+Del

$VM | Send-VMKeystrokes '^!{DELETE}'

You can also chain together sends, for example to login you might...

$VM |
    Send-VMKeystrokes '^!{DELETE}' -PauseAfterMilliseconds 500 -PassThru |
    Send-VMKeystrokes $UserName -Verbatim -PassThru |
    Send-VMKeystrokes '{TAB}' -PassThru |
    Send-VMKeystrokes $PlainTextPassword -Verbatim -SendCarriageReturn

Credit

Significant inspiration for this module came from code created by William Lam and David Rodriguez. The primary code source I pulled from is VMKeystrokes.ps1. Significant changes in both how this module handles input as well as how it's processed has been made.