powershell - Get last n lines or bytes of a huge file in Windows (like Unix's tail). Avoid time consuming options

Question

I need to retrieve the last n lines of huge files (1-4 Gb), in Windows 7. Due to corporate restrictions, I cannot run any command that is not built-in. The problem is that all solutions I found appear to read the whole file, so they are extremely slow.

Can this be accomplished, fast?

Notes:

1. I managed to get the first n lines, fast.
2. It is ok if I get the last n bytes. (I used this https://stackoverflow.com/a/18936628/2707864 for the first n bytes).

Solutions here Unix tail equivalent command in Windows Powershell did not work. Using -wait does not make it fast. I do not have -tail (and I do not know if it will work fast).

PS: There are quite a few related questions for head and tail, but not focused on the issue of speed. Therefore, useful or accepted answers there may not be useful here. E.g.,

Windows equivalent of the 'tail' command

CMD.EXE batch script to display last 10 lines from a txt file

Extract N lines from file using single windows command

https://serverfault.com/questions/490841/how-to-display-the-first-n-lines-of-a-command-output-in-windows-the-equivalent

powershell to get the first x MB of a file

https://superuser.com/questions/859870/windows-equivalent-of-the-head-c-command

Answer 1

If you have PowerShell 3 or higher, you can use the -Tail parameter for Get-Content to get the last n lines.

Get-content -tail 5 PATH_TO_FILE;

On a 34MB text file on my local SSD, this returned in 1 millisecond vs. 8.5 seconds for get-content |select -last 5