Remove Top Line of Text File with PowerShell

I just had to do the same task, and gc | select ... | sc took over 4 GB of RAM on my machine while reading a 1.6 GB file. It didn't finish for at least 20 minutes after reading the whole file in (as reported by Read Bytes in Process Explorer), at which point I had to kill it.

My solution was to use a more .NET approach: StreamReader + StreamWriter. See this answer for a great answer discussing the perf: In Powershell, what's the most efficient way to split a large text file by record type?

Below is my solution. Yes, it uses a temporary file, but in my case, it didn't matter (it was a freaking huge SQL table creation and insert statements file):

PS> (measure-command{
    $i = 0
    $ins = New-Object System.IO.StreamReader "in/file/pa.th"
    $outs = New-Object System.IO.StreamWriter "out/file/pa.th"
    while( !$ins.EndOfStream ) {
        $line = $ins.ReadLine();
        if( $i -ne 0 ) {
            $outs.WriteLine($line);
        }
        $i = $i+1;
    }
    $outs.Close();
    $ins.Close();
}).TotalSeconds

It returned:

188.1224443

It is not the most efficient in the world, but this should work:

get-content $file |
    select -Skip 1 |
    set-content "$file-temp"
move "$file-temp" $file -Force

Using variable notation, you can do it without a temporary file:

${C:\file.txt} = ${C:\file.txt} | select -skip 1

function Remove-Topline ( [string[]]$path, [int]$skip=1 ) {
  if ( -not (Test-Path $path -PathType Leaf) ) {
    throw "invalid filename"
  }

  ls $path |
    % { iex "`${$($_.fullname)} = `${$($_.fullname)} | select -skip $skip" }
}

While I really admire the answer from @hoge both for a very concise technique and a wrapper function to generalize it and I encourage upvotes for it, I am compelled to comment on the other two answers that use temp files (it gnaws at me like fingernails on a chalkboard!).

Assuming the file is not huge, you can force the pipeline to operate in discrete sections--thereby obviating the need for a temp file--with judicious use of parentheses:

(Get-Content $file | Select-Object -Skip 1) | Set-Content $file

... or in short form:

(gc $file | select -Skip 1) | sc $file