PowerShell get number of lines of big (large) file

Question

One of the ways to get number of lines from a file is this method in PowerShell:

PS C:\\Users\\Pranav\\Desktop\\PS_Test_Scripts> $a=Get-Content .\\sub.ps1         


        

Answer 1

The first thing to try is to stream Get-Content and build up the line count one at a time, rather that storing all lines in an array at once. I think that this will give proper streaming behavior - i.e. the entire file will not be in memory at once, just the current line.

$lines = 0
Get-Content .\File.txt |%{ $lines++ }

And as the other answer suggests, adding -ReadCount could speed this up.

If that doesn't work for you (too slow or too much memory) you could go directly to a StreamReader:

$count = 0
$reader = New-Object IO.StreamReader 'c:\logs\MyLog.txt'
while($reader.ReadLine() -ne $null){ $count++ }
$reader.Close()  # Don't forget to do this. Ideally put this in a try/finally block to make sure it happens.