Often you may want to use PowerShell to get the last N lines of a file.
The easiest way to do so is by using the Get-Content cmdlet with the -Tail parameter:
Get-Content players.txt -Tail 4
This particular example gets the last 4 lines of the text file named players.txt.
Note that -Last is an alias of the -Tail parameter and will also extract the last N lines of a file:
Get-Content players.txt -Last 4
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice to get the last N lines of a file.
Example: How to Get Last N Lines of File Using PowerShell
Suppose we have a file named players.txt that contains information about various basketball players.
We can use the Get-Content cmdlet to view the contents of this file:
Now suppose that we would like to only get the last 4 lines of the file.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
Get-Content players.txt -Tail 4
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns only the last 4 lines of the file.
Also note that we could use the -Last parameter instead to get the same results:
Get-Content players.txt -Last 4
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this also returns the last 4 lines of the file.
Note: You can find the complete documentation for the Get-Content cmdlet in PowerShell here.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
PowerShell: How to Get Last Item in Array
PowerShell: How to List Files in Directory by Date
PowerShell: How to List All Files in Directory to Text File
