tail for Windows?

Question

Is there an equivalent command for the Linux tail command in Windows 7 without Powershell installed?

Answer 1

If you don't want Cygwin (heavy), GnuWin32 has a tail version. UnxUtils also has.

Answer 2

Have you checked out cygwin? All of your favourite utilities :-)

For best results, combine it with puttycyg.

Answer 3

Check

> tail for win32

http://tailforwin32.sourceforge.net/

It is one on sourceforge projects. All free & open source :)

Answer 4

There are several possibilities:

• Use a port of a Unix tail command. There are several choices. Oft-mentioned are GNUWin32, cygwin, and unxutils. Less well known, but in some ways better, are the tools in the SFUA utility toolkit, which run in the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications that comes right there in the box with Windows 7 Ultimate edition and Windows Server 2008 R2. (For Windows XP, one can download and install Services for UNIX version 3.5.) This toolkit has a large number of command-line TUI tools, from mv and du, through the Korn and C shells, to perl and awk. It comes in both x86-64 and IA64 flavours as well as x86-32. The programs run in Windows' native proper POSIX environment, rather than with emulator DLLs (such as cygwin1.dll) layering things over Win32. And yes, the toolkit has head and tail, as well as some 300 others.
  For older versions of Windows, there's a tail in the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools.
• Use one of the many native Win32 tail commands that people have written and published. Many seem to concentrate upon tail's -f option — such as Gene Michael Stover's tail-f, BaremetalSoft's WinTail, HooTech's Hoo WinTail, Martin Wendt's WinTail, and Tail for Win32, to pick just five out of the hundreds.