How to tail logs with Windows PowerShell

Paul Hill

October 15, 2020 • 2 min read

CONTENTS

    Lately I’ve been needing to watch some logs that are creating by my IIS 10 server. The problem is that they are in TXT format and I can’t see live updates unless I close and open the file.

    Log File Notepad
    Log File Notepad

    I work with Centos 7 (open source Linux OS) and they have a wonder tail command that you can use to get scrolling updates as a file is changed. It is perfect for log files!

    Well…come to find out you can do the same thing with PowerShell:

    Get the last 10 lines of a text file:

    This is a simple command to just get the last 10 lines of text in a file:

    Get-Content [path\to\textfile.txt] -tail 10
    Image 6
    Get the last 10 lines in a text file with PowerShell

    Follow a TXT file with PowerShell

    This command is equivilent to tail -f on Centos Linux. It will output all of the file contents and update each time a new line is added:

    Get-Content [path\to\textfile.txt] -wait
    Get Content Wait 1
    Get Content Wait 1

    Follow TXT file with PowerShell OGV command

    My personal favorite (and even better than the standard -tail command IMO) is piping the output to Out-GridView or OGV:

    get-content [path\to\textfile.txt] -wait | ogv
    Get Content Wait Ogv 1
    Get Content -Wait | OGV

    Out-GridView allows you to filter for specific events. So it will be updated live and you can filter the data. Awesome!

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