The Windows PowerShell Get-Content cmdlet can provide the equivalent to the Unix/Linux head and tail commands. E.g., suppose a file named
somefile.txt contains the following
ten lines:
line 1 line 2 line 3 line 4 line 5 line 6 line 7 line 8 line 9 line 10
The following Get-Content commands could be used to obtain the first 5 and the last 5 lines in the file.
PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents> Get-Content somefile.txt -Head 5 line 1 line 2 line 3 line 4 line 5 PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents> Get-Content somefile.txt -Tail 5 line 6 line 7 line 8 line 9 line 10 PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents> Get-Content somefile.txt -TotalCount 5 line 1 line 2 line 3 line 4 line 5 C:\Users\Arnold\Documents>
The TotalCount parameter can function like the
Head parameter and will return the first x number of
lines specified with x being 5 in the example above. You can also
use it to obtain a specific line, though. E.g., if you wished to see the
7th line in the file, you could use the command below.
PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents> (Get-Content Somefile.txt -TotalCount 7)[-1] line 7 PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents>
By default the delimiter for lines is the
newline, aka end-of-line
character, \n, but you can change that with the -Delimiter
parameter.
References:
