How to use Tail in Windows Powershell

Published on Author JFLeave a comment

Windows is slowly, but surely, catching up to the hundreds of useful utilities for reading file content that *nix have had for forever.

As you know, opening a 1 gig log file in notepad is impossible. Even using Notepad++, which can open some pretty large files, will not open a 1 gig file.

Thank you, Powershell. We can use Tail!

As is always preferable, open Poweshell as Administrator (shift-right-click on the icon > Run as administrator).

Enter the following:

get-content log-file-name.log -tail 100

Another crafty method is to use 7-zip to create a tar ball and change the “Split to volumes” option so that the file is split up into more management chunks.

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.