Displaying Full File Content (cat)

Command Equivalents

Description

The Get-Content cmdlet reads the content of a file and displays it. Its most common alias, cat, makes it a familiar command for Linux users wanting to quickly view the entire contents of a text file.

Behind the scenes, Get-Content reads the file line by line and outputs each line as a separate string object. This object-based approach makes its output incredibly easy to pipe and process in subsequent commands.

Common Usage

Displaying a Single File

To display the full contents of a file to the console, simply provide the path.

# Using the alias is most common
cat C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

# Using the full cmdlet name
Get-Content -Path ".\my-script.ps1"

Displaying Multiple Files

Like the Linux cat command, Get-Content can accept an array of paths to display multiple files one after the other.

# This will display the content of file1.log followed by file2.log
cat file1.log, file2.log

Reading File Content into a Variable

A common use in scripts is to read the entire content of a file into a variable for later processing. The variable will contain an array of strings, with each string being one line from the file.

# Reads all lines from the config file into the $configFileContents variable
$configFileContents = Get-Content -Path ".\settings.conf"

A Note on Large Files

Be aware that by default, Get-Content reads the entire file into memory. While this is fine for most configuration files and scripts, it can be slow and consume a lot of memory if used on very large log files (multiple gigabytes). For simply viewing the beginning or end of large files, it is better to use the -Head or -Tail parameters, which are covered in a separate topic.