Comments on: More Fun with Get-Content

By: Jeffery Hicks

Jeffery Hicks — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:18:00 +0000

dus,
You can only use Get-Content with text files. To work with Excel you would need to use the Excel COM object just as you would with VBScript, although with PowerShell it can be interactive. If you can save your data as a CSV you could also use the Import-CSV cmdlet. Each line would be an object. Its properties would be the column headings. You would use something like:

import-csv mydata.csv | Select myproperty

By: Dus

Dus — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:50:00 +0000

I have an excel document that has 7 columns and I want to get the last column of data. How do you specify which column you want get-content to pull from?

By: Jeffery Hicks

Jeffery Hicks — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 01:32:00 +0000

Here's an even more efficient function:
Function GetTail {
param([string]$file,[int]$lines)
(cat $file)[-$lines..-1]
}

Thanks to Vinicius Canto for the tip.