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 f

Answer 1

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]  [-Count ] [-Encoding ] [-LineTerminator ] [-Wait] []

    Get-FileTail [-LiteralPath]  [-Count ] [-Encoding ] [-LineTerminator ] [-Wait] []

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.