Get last n lines or bytes of a huge file in Windows (like Unix's tail). Avoid time consuming options

If you have PowerShell 3 or higher, you can use the -Tail parameter for Get-Content to get the last n lines.

Get-content -tail 5 PATH_TO_FILE;

On a 34MB text file on my local SSD, this returned in 1 millisecond vs. 8.5 seconds for get-content |select -last 5

How about this (reads last 8 bytes for demo):

$fpath = "C:\10GBfile.dat"
$fs = [IO.File]::OpenRead($fpath)
$fs.Seek(-8, 'End') | Out-Null
for ($i = 0; $i -lt 8; $i++)
{
    $fs.ReadByte()
}

---

UPDATE. To interpret bytes as string (but be sure to select correct encoding - here UTF8 is used):

$N = 8
$fpath = "C:\10GBfile.dat"
$fs = [IO.File]::OpenRead($fpath)
$fs.Seek(-$N, [System.IO.SeekOrigin]::End) | Out-Null
$buffer = new-object Byte[] $N
$fs.Read($buffer, 0, $N) | Out-Null
$fs.Close()
[System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString($buffer)

---

UPDATE 2. To read last M lines, we'll be reading the file by portions until there are more than M newline char sequences in the result:

$M = 3
$fpath = "C:\10GBfile.dat"

$result = ""
$seq = "`r`n"
$buffer_size = 10
$buffer = new-object Byte[] $buffer_size

$fs = [IO.File]::OpenRead($fpath)
while (([regex]::Matches($result, $seq)).Count -lt $M)
{
    $fs.Seek(-($result.Length + $buffer_size), [System.IO.SeekOrigin]::End) | Out-Null
    $fs.Read($buffer, 0, $buffer_size) | Out-Null
    $result = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString($buffer) + $result
}
$fs.Close()

($result -split $seq) | Select -Last $M

Try playing with bigger $buffer_size - this ideally is equal to expected average line length to make fewer disk operations. Also pay attention to $seq - this could be \r\n or just \n. This is very dirty code without any error handling and optimizations.

With the awesome answer by Aziz Kabyshev, which solves the issue of speed, and with some googling, I ended up using this script

$fpath = $Args[1]
$fs = [IO.File]::OpenRead($fpath)
$fs.Seek(-$Args[0], 'End') | Out-Null
$mystr = ''
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $Args[0]; $i++)
{
    $mystr = ($mystr) + ([char[]]($fs.ReadByte()))
}
$fs.Close()
Write-Host $mystr

which I call from a batch file containing

@PowerShell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "& '.\myscript.ps1' %1 %2"

(thanks to How to run a PowerShell script from a batch file).