Category Archives: PowerShell

Tail a file on Windows

On almost every Unix system, we have tail -f to watch the end of *really really big* files.

When faced with a 36GB log file on Windows the tooling is often lacking.

I borrowed / adapted a little PowerShell function to extract the last n log lines from a file, and write to a new file:
https://gist.github.com/crossan007/b5e8ac4579ba61eb1967315657406751

Partially borrowed from: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36507343/get-last-n-lines-or-bytes-of-a-huge-file-in-windows-like-unixs-tail-avoid-ti