#45 : Display top n lines or last n lines of a file

Often we reach to a situation where we need to get top 10 or 100 lines of a file.
These commands are fairly simple in Unix shell programming and most of you must have used Head and Tail commands. Those commands work really fast and accurate.

Keeping these points in mind, I dig something and want to share will all of you.

How to use Head and Tail Commands in Powershell?

To get the top 10 lines -
Get-Content ".\file_test.txt" | select -First 10

To get the top 10 lines -

Get-Content ".\file_test.txt" | select -Last 10

Easy! This is power of Powershell !

Some more Examples:

Problem: Write a command to get 3rd line of a file.

Solution:
Get-Content ".\file_test.txt" | select -First 3 | select -Last 1

Problem: Write a command to skip 10 lines from top and display rest all lines of file.

Solution:
Get-Content ".\file_test.txt" | select -Skip 10

But this approach has one drawback, when file is so big, it takes a little more time to produce results.

To be able to read a big file, you can adjust Get-Content to read only few lines. As you saw, we were reading the complete file before that caused more memory consumption.



Enjoy Scripting!!