Interactive file reading with Powershell

Sometimes you want to see the contents of text file whilst it is still being updated, a common example is where you are outputting to a log file and need to see the output interactively without having to keep opening the file to check for progress, or to see if a job has complete.

Luckily there is the very useful Get-Content Powershell Command.

This can take a “-wait” parameter that will reread the file every second or so and check for updates, displaying it in the console (until you end the command with Ctrl&C as usual).

So for example the command below will read the file constantly until you tell it to stop:

Get-Content C:\Logs\Log.txt -wait

In addition there is the “-Tail” parameter which is the Powershell equivalent to the Unix tail command. This will read the last few lines of the file only and not the whole file. This can be used on its own like this:

Get-Content C:\Logs\Log.txt -tail 5

…which displays the last 5 lines of the file. Or you can combine -wait and -tail together to constantly read the last (specified) number of lines:

Get-Content C:\Logs\Log.txt -wait -tail 5

For more information, see Get-Content Powershell Command on MSDN.