Unix tail equivalent command in Windows Powershell

Question

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

http://tailforwin32.sourceforge.net/

and

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

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

PowerShell Community Extensions (PSCX) provides the Get-FileTail cmdlet. It looks like a suitable solution for the task. Note: I did not try it with extremely large files but the description says it efficiently tails the contents and it is designed for large log files.

NAME
    Get-FileTail

SYNOPSIS
    PSCX Cmdlet: Tails the contents of a file - optionally waiting on new content.

SYNTAX
    Get-FileTail [-Path] <String[]> [-Count <Int32>] [-Encoding <EncodingParameter>] [-LineTerminator <String>] [-Wait] [<CommonParameters>]

    Get-FileTail [-LiteralPath] <String[]> [-Count <Int32>] [-Encoding <EncodingParameter>] [-LineTerminator <String>] [-Wait] [<CommonParameters>]

DESCRIPTION
    This implentation efficiently tails the cotents of a file by reading lines from the end rather then processing the entire file. This behavior is crucial for ef
    ficiently tailing large log files and large log files over a network.  You can also specify the Wait parameter to have the cmdlet wait and display new content
    as it is written to the file.  Use Ctrl+C to break out of the wait loop.  Note that if an encoding is not specified, the cmdlet will attempt to auto-detect the
     encoding by reading the first character from the file. If no character haven't been written to the file yet, the cmdlet will default to using Unicode encoding
    . You can override this behavior by explicitly specifying the encoding via the Encoding parameter.

Answer 3

try Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools

it contains a tail.exe which can be run on Windows system.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17657

Answer 4

For completeness I'll mention that Powershell 3.0 now has a -Tail flag on Get-Content

Get-Content ./log.log -Tail 10

gets the last 10 lines of the file

Get-Content ./log.log -Wait -Tail 10

gets the last 10 lines of the file and waits for more

Answer 5

Just some additions to previous answers. There are aliases defined for Get-Content, for example if you are used to UNIX you might like cat, and there are also type and gc. So instead of

Get-Content -Path <Path> -Wait -Tail 10

you can write

# Print whole file and wait for appended lines and print them
cat <Path> -Wait
# Print last 10 lines and wait for appended lines and print them
cat <Path> -Tail 10 -Wait

Answer 6

As of PowerShell version 3.0, the Get-Content cmdlet has a -Tail parameter that should help. See the technet library online help for Get-Content.