{"id":97,"date":"2007-02-13T12:08:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-13T16:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jdhitsolutions.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/13\/powershell-get-content\/"},"modified":"2013-07-02T08:11:42","modified_gmt":"2013-07-02T12:11:42","slug":"powershell-get-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jdhitsolutions.com\/blog\/powershell\/97\/powershell-get-content\/","title":{"rendered":"PowerShell Get Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

One slick trick you can do in PowerShell with text files that's difficult to accomplish without extra tools is to display sections of text files without showing the entire file. When you use the Get-Content cmdlet, the resulting content is treated as an array of strings. This means you can simply specify the line you want displayed like this:<\/p>\n

(get-content c:\\boot.ini)[0]<\/span><\/p>\n

Don't forget that arrays start counting at 0. If you want to see a range of lines, simply specify the range:<\/p>\n

(get-content c:\\boot.ini)[0..5]<\/span><\/p>\n

This will display the first 6 lines of c:\\boot.ini. Want to look at the last X number of lines? Well you first need to get the number of lines.<\/p>\n

(get-content c:\\boot.ini).Length<\/span><\/p>\n

Once you know the length, specify whatever range you want. My boot.ini is 7 lines long so if I wanted to see the last 3 lines I would simply run<\/p>\n

(get-content c:\\boot.ini)[5..7]<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, this little tidbit wouldn't be complete without a one-liner to get the last 5 lines without knowing in advance how long the file is:<\/p>\n

$c=get-content c:\\boot.ini;$l=$c.length;$c[($l-5)..$l]<\/span><\/p>\n

If you specify a number greater than the value of $l then the entire file will be returned.<\/p>\n

Obviously the boot.ini file is hardly an exciting thing to test so try this out on log files on your systems. <\/p>\n

These commands are very similar to the Head and Tail utilities and in fact you could easily turn these into your own Head and Tail functions.<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: PowerShell<\/a>, Scripting<\/a>, GetContent, cmdlet<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One slick trick you can do in PowerShell with text files that’s difficult to accomplish without extra tools is to display sections of text files without showing the entire file. When you use the Get-Content cmdlet, the resulting content is treated as an array of strings. 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