Using head command in Windows

Recently I had to read first few lines of a very large sql dump file (of size 15GB) in one Windows server. It’s quite easy in a Linux box, but I was in mess how to do it in the Windows system. After some searching I found CoreUtils. It’s a collection of some small handy utilities for basic file, shell and text manipulation and these utilities mainly exist in GNU operating system. You can download CoreUtils for Windows from  http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm. I have downloaded the zip archive coreutils-5.3.0-bin.zip in my Windows 2003 server machine and extracted in D:\coreutils-5.3.0-bin . Now lets see if I can run the head command


Oops some error, I need to download the dependency files also.


Now I have downloaded the dependency archive file coreutils-5.3.0-dep.zip. Extract the archive and copy the libiconv2.dll and libintl3.dll files into the coreutils bin folder. Now lets try again


Yeeppiiiii….. this time it worked. Now I can run the head command in Windows also. This is very helpful in reading large log files in Windows server using the very useful command like head (in Windows using more command we may alternate the head command). But I am always comfortable with head command and it was a big relief for me :) .