Inserting blank lines in powershell console

FelixHJ picture FelixHJ · Feb 5, 2015 · Viewed 52.6k times · Source

On unix I can do a

tail -f file

And the equivalent powershell command is

gc file -Wait

However on unix I can press enter to add some blank lines (for readability) on the console while it is outputting lines, but not in powershell. Any workaround?


Use case: On unix I run tail -f /some/webserver/log/file and it outputs the last part of the log. I then do some http-requests and the log scrolls by accordingly. I then press enter a couple of times to get some blank space in the console, so the log entry for the next request stands out because of the blank lines above.

Answer

justinf picture justinf · Feb 5, 2015

You can use `n to create a new line .

This is just a small example , if you want to modife the out put of the Get-Content command you should store the out put and then and the new line to line 10 for example then retrieve the out put.

write-host "This is an example"
write-host "`n"
write-host "just to show how to add a new line"

This example reads a file and when it get to line to in inserts a space.

$content = Get-Content C:\Dump\test.txt
foreach ($line in $content)
{   
  if ($line.ReadCount -eq 2) { Write-Host "`n$line" }
  Else{$line}

}

This is the out put

Line 1

Line 2
Line 3
Line 4
Line 5
Line 6
Line 7