Chris Koester has a quick-and-easy file reader in a few lines of C#:
This post describes one way that you can read the top N rows from large text files with C#. This is very useful when working with giant files that are too big to open, but you need to view a portion of them to determine the schema, data types, etc.
I’ve used PowerShell many times to do this with large csv files, but in this example we’re going to use C# and look at the Wikipedia XML dump of pages and articles. The 3017-03-01 dump is very large and comes in at 59.5 GB.
I’ve had to write something similar before on Windows machines where I didn’t have access to more/less. It’s really helpful for perusing the first few lines of gigantic log files.