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. I work with Centos 7 (open source Linux OS) and they have…
15 October, 2020 - 3 min read
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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.
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
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
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
Out-GridView allows you to filter for specific events. So it will be updated live and you can filter the data. Awesome!