How to monitor a file in real time on Windows?

Question

When deploying services and applications to servers, be able to monitor the log seeing all the updates as soon as they occur, greatly facilitates this task.

On Linux, I use Tail which only loads the end of the file, being therefore excellent to handle large files:

tail -f /usr/local/myservice/file.log

In Windows, there is some alternative to CMD?
If not, what alternative outside the CMD?

Answer 1

Via CMD, I do not know any solution, but below some alternatives:

Using the Powershell:

Get-Content arquivo.log –Wait

If you want to make filters, we can use another concatenated command called Where:

Get-Content myTestLog.log -wait | where { $_ -match "WARNING" }

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I particularly like to use the baretail, for having the possibility, to create rules of colors, so I put as a rule the word "ERROR" and turns red the line, whenever you have the word, I recommend.

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In the article, Tail a Log File on Windows & Linux, can find more alternatives.

Answer 2

If you want to continue using the tail you can install Mingw

https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/

with it you can execute the command itself.

C:\>tail -f log.txt

Answer 3

Use the command below to always monitor the last line of the file (in powershell)

>powershell
>Get-Content SEU_ARQUIVO –Wait