If you call baretail.exe on a command line, you can give it paths to log files as parameters. Instead of doing that every time, you can script out paths in batch files. Below is a simple example of calling baretail.exe with paths to three log files on the same server.
PowerShell is a powerful tool and it enables the Windows servers to compete with the Shell and Linux command line features. One of the useful command in linux is tail which helps us to view the file as it gets updated mostly used to view the log files.
Baretail Alternative
- BareTail is a real-time file viewing utility. Like the Unix tail -f utility, it can be used to view the end of a growing file. It is ideal for viewing application traces or server logs in real time, as they are generated.
- I have been using BareTail for low-footprint log reading, and it works wonderfully. In particular, I like that it can consume very large large files, detect changes to those files, all without consuming much memory at all.
For instance, we start a service and we want to know if the service is coming up and check the errors in the log file, live without having to re-open the file.
Until I was introduced to this PowerShell command method, I was using either baretail or notepad++ to tail the log files in Windows
PowerShell tail Command Get-Content
Powershell has a command named Get-Content it exactly does the job as it was named after. It gets content from the file. This command has a flag or attribute named Tail which make it equivalent to the Linux tail command
Here is a simple tail command equivalent windows powershell Get-Content command.
Execution result of the preceding command is given below.
PowerShell tail -f Command Get-Content
the wonderful feature of tail is to watch for changes as it happens and see the live logs as it is getting updated. which is done using a -f flag in Linux tail command
In windows, the same is achieved with another flag/option named Wait
here is the windows PowerShell tail -f command equivalent Get-Content command
In fact, it is the same command as previous but an extra -Wait has been added.
As shown in the screenshot you can see the cursor is at the end of the file it has not returned to terminal and monitoring (or) waiting for more lines to come.
Conclusion
Hope this article helped you to find the Linux Equivalent Windows find command in Powershell and now you know how to tail the log file in windows without using any special tools like baretail etc.
Cheers
Sarav
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