How to monitor a text file in realtime [closed]

Question

For debugging purposes in a somewhat closed system, I have to output text to a file.

Does anyone know of a tool that runs on windows (console based or not) that detects changes to a file and outputs them in real-time?

Answer 1

I like tools that will perform more than one task, Notepad++ is a great notepad replacement and has a Document Monitor plugin (installs with standard msi) that works great. It also is portable so you can have it on a thumb drive for use anywhere.

For a command line option, PowerShell (which is really a new command line) has a great feature already mentioned.

Get-Content someFile.txt -wait 

But you can also filter at the command line using a regular expression

Get-Content web.log -wait | where { $_ -match "ERROR" } 

Answer 2

• Tail for Win32
• Apache Chainsaw - used this with log4net logs, may require file to be in a certain format