How to do what head tail more less sed do in Powershell

Question

On windows  using Powershell  what are the equivalent commands to linux s head  tail  more  less and sed

User · Answer

more exe exists on Windows  ports of less are easily found  and the PowerShell Community Extensions  PSCX  includes one    PowerShell doesn t really provide any alternative to separate programs for either  but for structured data Out-Grid can be helpful   Head and Tail can both be emulated with Select-Object using the -First and -Last parameters respectively   Sed functions are all available but structured rather differently  The filtering options are available in Where-Object  or via Foreach-Object and some state for ranges   Other  transforming  operations can be done with Select-Object and Foreach-Object   However as PowerShell passes   NET  objects     with all their typed structure  eg  dates remain DateTime instances     rather than just strings  which each command needs to parse itself  much of sed and other such programs are redundant

User · Answer

Get-Content  alias  gc  is your usual option for reading a text file  You can then filter further   gc log txt   select -first 10   head gc -TotalCount 10 log txt       also head gc log txt   select -last 10    tail gc -Tail 10 log txt             also tail  since PSv3   also much faster than above option gc log txt   more               or less if you have it installed gc log txt         -replace   d       0               sed   This works well enough for small files  larger ones  more than a few MiB  are probably a bit slow   The PowerShell Community Extensions include some cmdlets for specialised file stuff  e g  Get-FileTail

User · Answer

Here are the built-in ways to do head and tail  Don t use pipes because if you have a large file  it will be extremely slow  Using these built-in options will be extremely fast even for huge files   gc log txt -head 10  gc log txt -tail 10 gc log txt -tail 10 -wait   equivalent to tail -f

User · Answer

I got some better solutions   gc log txt -ReadCount 5        throw  pipeline end      head gc log txt      num 0    num     num                    cat -n gc log txt      num 0    num    if  num -gt 2 -and  num -lt 7    num         sed

User · Answer

Push Pop    ErrorActionPreference  Suppresses errors  ErrorActionPreference      SilentlyContinue     Suppresses errors  Script      gc   output   csv -ReadCount 5        throw  pipeline end      head      gc   output   csv      num 0    num     num                    cat -n     gc   output   csv      num 0    num    if  num -gt 2 -and  num -lt 7    num         sed  End Script   ErrorActionPreference    Push Pop  Suppresses errors   You don t get all the errors with the pushpop code BTW  your code only works with the  sed  option  All the rest ignores anything but gc and path

User · Answer

If you need to query large  or small  log files on Windows  the best tool I have found is Microsoft s free Log Parser 2 2   You can call it from PowerShell if you want and it will do all the heavy lifting for you  and very fast too

User · Answer

-TotalCount  in this instance responds exactly like  -head   You have to use -TotalCount or -head to run the command like that  But -TotalCount is misleading - it does not work in ACTUALLY giving you ANY counts     gc -TotalCount 25 C  scripts logs robocopy report txt   The above script  tested in PS 5 1 is the SAME response as below     gc -head 25 C  scripts logs robocopy report txt   So then just use  -head 25  already

[windows] How to do what head, tail, more, less, sed do in Powershell?

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