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 (eg 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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

我就是用的少的GOW版本，效果很好。

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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

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