How to process a file in PowerShell line-by-line as a stream

If you are really about to work on multi-gigabyte text files then do not use PowerShell. Even if you find a way to read it faster processing of huge amount of lines will be slow in PowerShell anyway and you cannot avoid this. Even simple loops are expensive, say for 10 million iterations (quite real in your case) we have:

# "empty" loop: takes 10 seconds
measure-command { for($i=0; $i -lt 10000000; ++$i) {} }

# "simple" job, just output: takes 20 seconds
measure-command { for($i=0; $i -lt 10000000; ++$i) { $i } }

# "more real job": 107 seconds
measure-command { for($i=0; $i -lt 10000000; ++$i) { $i.ToString() -match '1' } }

UPDATE: If you are still not scared then try to use the .NET reader:

$reader = [System.IO.File]::OpenText("my.log")
try {
    for() {
        $line = $reader.ReadLine()
        if ($line -eq $null) { break }
        # process the line
        $line
    }
}
finally {
    $reader.Close()
}

UPDATE 2

There are comments about possibly better / shorter code. There is nothing wrong with the original code with for and it is not pseudo-code. But the shorter (shortest?) variant of the reading loop is

$reader = [System.IO.File]::OpenText("my.log")
while($null -ne ($line = $reader.ReadLine())) {
    $line
}

System.IO.File.ReadLines() is perfect for this scenario. It returns all the lines of a file, but lets you begin iterating over the lines immediately which means it does not have to store the entire contents in memory.

Requires .NET 4.0 or higher.

foreach ($line in [System.IO.File]::ReadLines($filename)) {
    # do something with $line
}

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd383503.aspx

If you want to use straight PowerShell check out the below code.

$content = Get-Content C:\Users\You\Documents\test.txt
foreach ($line in $content)
{
    Write-Host $line
}