Is there an equivalent of tail -f on Windows?

In Powershell you can use Get-Content with the -Wait flag:

Get-Content filename.log -Wait

You can shorten Get-Content to gc. That question suggested as a possible duplicate has an answer which mentions this and some useful extra parameters - see https://stackoverflow.com/a/188126. I'm not sure if it's really a duplicate, though, since that question is talking about general Windows alternatives to Linux tail, rather than about tail -f.

In Powershell use:

cat .\<file_name> -Tail 10 -Wait

Yes. you can use tail on windows, which is a small price to pay to get access to a lot of GNU-tools on windows as well as tail. Because its bundle with git for windows, its pretty heavily tested and stable.

First install git-bash from https://gitforwindows.org/

Next, put git-bash on windows path using and reboot your workstation:

setx path "%path%;C:\Program Files\Git\bin\"

Now, you should be able to use tail -n 20 -F logging_file.log to tail any file and show the last 20 lines.

If you are on Linux/Unix and you want to continuously see logs you can use the following command: ssh [email protected] 'bash -c "tail -n 20 -F /c/Users/username/Desktop/logging_file.log"'