Windows XP equivalent of "tail -f"?

Question

Is there way have windows XP show me updates to a log file as they happen? I'm thinking of something similar to tail -f <file path> in the linux realm.

Answer 1

Using Windows Powershell, you can use Get-Content < filename > -wait

There's also a discussion of a Windows Server 2003 tools package that has a tail program which supports -f

Answer 2

I have had good luck with http://sourceforge.net/projects/tailforwin32/. It has some nice options for fonts, colors and keyword highlighting. Feels lightweight and fast to me.

Answer 3

Just use the tail program from the cygwin project. this is "just" a ported UN*X tail command.

Answer 4

We currently use this http://www.baremetalsoft.com/wintail/

Answer 5

I use UnxUtils which are native win32 ports of common gnu utilities. Then I don't have to bother with cygwin.

Answer 6

I can recommend LogExpert an other alternatives

Answer 7

If you happen to have a version of git installed that comes with bash (for instance the one from https://git-scm.com), you can use the tail included with that.

Answer 8

You can checkout in'side log.

A Java tool I created, able to read local and distant log files using SSH. It is fairly simple to use.

Some more explanations: https://github.com/pschweitz/insidelog/wiki

Just download the version corresponding to your operating system, or the native jar release executable within your Java Runtime (requires java 8_40 or higher):

https://github.com/pschweitz/insidelog/releases

You can find a complete documentation (embedded with and in Github's page as well)

Answer 9

Workaround in case of cmd.exe:

1. find /c /v "" your_file.txt - will count the number of lines in the file
2. more +123456 your_file.txt - will display lines starting from the specified line number

Calculate point 1 result minus tail you need and put it into point 2, and here it is