Often you may want to use the Get-Content cmdlet in PowerShell to read the contents of a file but skip the first N lines.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
Get-Content $my_file | Select-Object -Skip 3
This particular example will read all of the lines from the file located at the path we specified in $my_file but skip the first 3 lines.
Note: Feel free to replace 3 with whatever number you would like after the -Skip operator to instead skip a different number of lines at the beginning of the file.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Use Get-Content and Skip First N Lines in PowerShell
Suppose we have a file named teams.txt that contains ten total lines with the names of various basketball teams.
We can use the Get-Content cmdlet to view all of the lines in this file:
Suppose that we would like to read all of the lines of this file but skip the first 3 lines.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
$my_file = "c:\users\bobbi\teams.txt"
Get-Content $my_file | Select-Object -Skip 3
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that we are able to read all of the lines in the file but skip the first 3 lines.
Note that if you would instead like to skip the last 3 lines then you could use the -SkipLast operator instead:
$my_file = "c:\users\bobbi\teams.txt"
Get-Content $my_file | Select-Object -SkipLast 3
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that we are able to read all of the lines in the file but skip the last 3 lines.
Note: The -SkipLast operator is only available for PowerShell versions 5.0 or higher.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
PowerShell: How to Get First Line of File
PowerShell: How to Get First Item in Array
PowerShell: How to Get First Character of String
