How can I view a log file from powershell console ? (i.e. powershell equivalent of 'less')

What is the powershell equivalent of 'less'?

I see 'more', but it lacks some of the features I rely on (e.g. searching through the file)

I seek a pager (equivalent of 'less') which allows searching (match or ignore case), multiple files at once, etc.

Some of our servers run windows 2008 and I lack admin privileges to install cygwin

I had heard windows 2008, MSFT got their act together and provided some easy-for-admins tools.

Update:

I should give some context:

• I know little about power shell
• New servers have 2008 on them
• While I affection for many tools of yore, the dos prompt is not one of them
• I was hoping that Powershell had the equivalent of grep,ls,less, xargs, et
• I understood that powershell gave us those tools
• I fired off my question quickly.

thanks

It reads like you know you can do this:

gc logfile.log | more

(GC is an alias for Get-Content).

You may be able to do the filtering etc.. with this more information can be found by running these commands:

Get-Help Get-Content Get-Help

Get-Content -Examples

(Get-Help gc would work fine as well).

And the bits you may be interested in are limit\filter etc...

Get-Help gc -Parameter * | more

I just use the GOW version of less, works fine.

I don't know of any direct analogue for less in powershell that you can implement easily. Your best bet is to get a windows implementation of less that is outside of cygwin, that way you can just drop in the binary somewhere accessible to your account.

to get grep/vim/wget and other Linux like commands in powershell I suggest running.

iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring(‘https://get.scoop.sh’)

then

scoop install grep
scoop install perl
scoop install vim

and to get a list of all of them

scoop search

In Windows 10 PowerShell + Cygwin I use:

gc .\myfile.log | less

Previously I was trying to use cygwin directly:

less .\myfile.log

but it shows binary file because of invalid charset setting between 32b-bit and 64-bit.

I was hoping that Powershell had the equivalent of grep,ls,less, xargs, et

In the case you missed this question (top voted) you might enjoy this answer.