How can I view a log file from powershell console ? (i.e. powershell equivalent of 'less')

Question

What is the powershell equivalent of 'less'?

I see 'more', but it lacks some of the features I rely on (e.g. searching through the file)

I seek a pager (equivalent of 'less') which allows searching (match or ignore case), multiple files at once, etc.

Some of our servers run windows 2008 and I lack admin privileges to install cygwin

I had heard windows 2008, MSFT got their act together and provided some easy-for-admins tools.

Update:

I should give some context:

I know little about power shell
New servers have 2008 on them
While I affection for many tools of yore, the dos prompt is not one of them
I was hoping that Powershell had the equivalent of grep,ls,less, xargs, et
I understood that powershell gave us those tools
I fired off my question quickly.

thanks

score 22 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

22

It reads like you know you can do this:

gc logfile.log | more

(GC is an alias for Get-Content).

You may be able to do the filtering etc.. with this more information can be found by running these commands:

Get-Help Get-Content Get-Help

Get-Content -Examples

(Get-Help gc would work fine as well).

And the bits you may be interested in are limit\filter etc...

Get-Help gc -Parameter * | more

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered May 21 '11 at 09:10

Matt

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Do not works with objects, things are not separated by objects – MUY Belgium Sep 09 '14 at 15:00
@MUYBelgium I don't follow your comment, the command is used to read large amount of text. what are you trying to do with an object? – Matt Sep 14 '14 at 16:56
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This does not work for very large (big data) files. gc pulls it alll into memory. – Gabriel Fair Apr 13 '15 at 04:53
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@garglblarg Actually [`more` was originally an old command from unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_(command)) that MS ported to DOS (and still exists in unix today). Later, `less` was written for unix, but MS never ported that, unfortunately. – wisbucky Jan 13 '17 at 02:17
less is much better than more, for example it allows you to scroll and search through the text – Constantino Cronemberger Dec 07 '18 at 11:43

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered May 14 '15 at 23:27

5

I just use the GOW version of less, works fine.

answered May 14 '15 at 23:27

Dauchande

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 26 '15 at 18:07

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to get grep/vim/wget and other Linux like commands in powershell I suggest running.

iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring(‘https://get.scoop.sh’)

then

scoop install grep
scoop install perl
scoop install vim

and to get a list of all of them

scoop search

answered Feb 26 '15 at 18:07

ChadJPetersen

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another good extension is the powershell community extension set. – ChadJPetersen Feb 26 '15 at 18:12
Thanks for telling me about scoop. :) – ver Jun 22 '16 at 12:47

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered May 20 '11 at 18:56

I don't know of any direct analogue for less in powershell that you can implement easily. Your best bet is to get a windows implementation of less that is outside of cygwin, that way you can just drop in the binary somewhere accessible to your account.

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 28 '16 at 10:10

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In Windows 10 PowerShell + Cygwin I use:

gc .\myfile.log | less

Previously I was trying to use cygwin directly:

less .\myfile.log

but it shows binary file because of invalid charset setting between 32b-bit and 64-bit.

answered Jan 28 '16 at 10:10

Harun

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score 0 · Answer 6 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

0

I was hoping that Powershell had the equivalent of grep,ls,less, xargs, et

In the case you missed this question (top voted) you might enjoy this answer.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Community

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answered May 21 '11 at 09:53

Emiliano Poggi

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How can I view a log file from powershell console ? (i.e. powershell equivalent of 'less')

6 Answers6