Windows equivalent of the tail command

Question

Is there a way to simulate the  nix tail command on the Windows command line  I have a file and I want a way to snip off the first n lines of text  For example   D   gt type file txt line one line two line three D   gt   call to tail    gt  result txt  D   gt type result txt line two line three

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This is a total hack but if it s a huge file that you want to just examine the format  header  etc  and you re looking for a solution you can always just redirect the  more  output to a new file and CTRL-C quickly  The output rows can t be controlled precisely and you will most likely kill it in the middle of a line of output but it s a cheap way of grabbing a small bit of an otherwise unusable file   Ex    C  more test csv   test txt  C  C  more test txt line 1line 2etc        C

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I don t think there is way out of the box  There is no such command in DOS and batch files are far to limited to simulate it  without major pain

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Warning  using the batch file for  tokens  and delims capability on unknown text input can be a disaster due to the special interpretation of chars like  amp       lt   etc  Such methods should be reserved for only predictable text

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Get-content -Tail n file txt with powershell is the only thing that comes close to tail in linux    The Get-Content  filename    Select-Object -last  n  suggested above loads parse the whole thing  Needless to say  it was not happy with my 10GB log file    The -Tail option does start by the end of the file

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IF you have Windows PowerShell installed  I think it s included since XP  you can just run from cmd exe   Head Command   powershell -command   amp   Get-Content  filename  -TotalCount  n      Tail Command   powershell -command   amp   Get-Content  filename    Select-Object -last  n      or  directly from PowerShell   Get-Content  filename  -TotalCount  n  Get-Content  filename    Select-Object -last  n     update  PowerShell 3 0  Windows 8 and higher  added Tail command with alias Last  Head and First aliases to TotalCount were also added   So  commands can be re-written as  Get-Content  filename  -Head  n  Get-Content  filename  -Tail  n

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You could get CoreUtils from GnuWin32  which is a collection of standard unix tools  ported to Windows   It  among other things  contains head

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FWIW  for those just needing to snip off an indeterminate number of records from the head of the file  more     works well  This is useful just to have a smaller file to work with in the early stages of developing something

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in PS try to use command    Select -Last 1   This command can be pipelined also    Example to get first line    type   out txt   Select -Last 1   or to get the first line     type   out txt   Select -First 1

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When using more  n that Matt already mentioned  to avoid pauses in long files  try this   more  1 myfile txt   con  When you redirect the output from more  it doesn t pause - and here you redirect to the console   You can similarly redirect to some other file like this w o the pauses of more if that s your desired end result   Use   to redirect to file and overwrite it if it already exists  or    to append to an existing file   Can use either to redirect to con

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Powershell   Get-Content C  logs result txt -Tail 10  Get-Content C  logs result txt -wait  monitor the tail

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set  p line   lt  file csv  echo  line    it will return first line of your file in cmd Windows in variable  line

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There s a free head utility on this page that you can use  I haven t tried it yet

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more  e filename txt P n   where n   the number of rows to display  Works fast and is exactly like head command

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If you want the head command  one easy way to get it is to install Cygwin  Then you ll have all the UNIX tools at your disposal   If that isn t a good solution  then you can try using findstr and do a search for the end-of-line indicator   findstr on MSDN  http   technet microsoft com en-us library bb490907 aspx

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you can also use Git bash where head and tail are emulated as well

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Well  this will do it  but it s about as fast as it looks  roughly O n m   where n is the number of lines to display and m is the total number of lines in the file    for  l  l in  1 1 10  do  for  f  tokens 1 2  delims     a in   findstr  n  r     filename    findstr  r    l     do  echo  b   Where  10  is the number of lines you want to print  and  filename  is the name of the file

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Here is a fast native head command that gives you the first 9 lines in DOS   findstr  n     myfile txt   findstr         The first 2 characters on each line will be the line number

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There is a resource kit that can be downloaded from here  http   www microsoft com downloads en confirmation aspx familyId 9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd amp displayLang en  It contains a tail exe tool but it is only compatible with some Windows versions   Copied from this post  Tail command for windows

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I have not tried extracting a range  but I was able to get a line using the following DOS command        find  N       log find   6      Since most files contain spaces  this command pulls every line from all LOG files and basically numbers them starting from 1 for each file  The numbered results are then piped into the second FIND command which looks for the line tagged as number 6

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No exact equivalent  However there exist a native DOS command  more  that has a  n option that will start outputting the file after the nth line   DOS Prompt   C   gt more  2 myfile txt   The above command will output everything after the first 2 lines  This is actually the inverse of Unix head   Unix console   root server    head -2 myfile txt   The above command will print only the first 2 lines of the file

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As a contemporary answer  if running Windows 10 you can use the  Linux Subsystem for Windows    https   docs microsoft com en-us windows wsl install-win10  This will allow you to run native linux commands from within windows and thus run tail exactly how you would in linux

[windows] Windows equivalent of the 'tail' command

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