windowspowershellunixtail

Unix tail equivalent command in Windows Powershell

I have to look at the last few lines of a large file (typical size is 500MB-2GB). I am looking for an equivalent of the Unix command tail for Windows Powershell. A few alternatives available are,

http://tailforwin32.sourceforge.net/

and

Get-Content [filename] | Select-Object -Last 10

For me, the first alternative is not allowed, and the second alternative is slow. Does anyone know of an efficient implementation of tail for PowerShell?

Solution

  • Use the -wait parameter with Get-Content, which displays lines as they are added to the file. This feature was present in PowerShell v1, but for some reason not documented well in v2.

    Here is an example

    Get-Content -Path "C:\scripts\test.txt" -Wait

    Once you run this, update and save the file and you will see the changes on the console.