Windows Equivalent of the 'head -c' command

Simplifying this answer because of @chubbsondubs' comment.

-TotalCount will count lines if reading in text, so always force it to read the file as bytes, then the -TotalCount will only refer to bytes and you can get an account count.

Get-Content test.txt -Encoding byte -TotalCount 2KB | Set-Content test1.txt -Encoding byte

More information here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/888063/powershell-to-get-the-first-x-mb-of-a-file

From what I can tell you can't print out by size in a native way; there is the type command which will output a whole text file, but you can't specify how much you want to output.

There is also the more command, which will allow you to print out lines of a file. These are some of the flags from more /?:

/E      Enable extended features
/C      Clear screen before displaying page
/P      Expand FormFeed characters
/S      Squeeze multiple blank lines into a single line
/Tn     Expand tabs to n spaces (default 8)

        Switches can be present in the MORE environment
        variable.

+n      Start displaying the first file at line n

files   List of files to be displayed. Files in the list
        are separated by blanks.

If extended features are enabled, the following commands
are accepted at the -- More -- prompt:

P n     Display next n lines
S n     Skip next n lines
F       Display next file
Q       Quit
=       Show line number
?       Show help line
<space> Display next page
<ret>   Display next line

If neither of these work for you, you can alternatively install Cygwin and you can use cat or head.