Using get-content

01 Jun 2022 - jhunter

Sources

get-help get-content

Command

get-content

Alias

more, gc, and cat

Definition

Read a file.

Options

-Tail allows you to only see the last x lines of a file.

Example

Get-content lets you simply read a file, but I tend to use it to work with a list of (a little) data that originated from outside of PowerShell. In this example I save a list in text file, then use get-content to put the list into a variable.

$list = get-content .\test.txt

In this way I can loop through the data with other commands.

foreach($pc in $list) {write-host "PC is : $pc" -ForegroundColor yellow}

Example

Here I use -Tail with an infinite loop to read (or “watch”) a log file where I expect to see changes.

while($true){cls ; Get-Content .\testlog.txt -Tail 5 ; Start-Sleep 5 }

Example

The alias more is not an exact alias of get-content because more will show part of the file content if that content is longer than the screen height (this is called “pagination”).

In this way more can be used in two ways:

get-content ./mylongfile.txt | more

more ./mylargefile.txt