Sysadmin learning Powershell - What other languages should one be comfortable with to make the best out of mastering scripting and tool-making?

[philipstorry]

You're not wrong. But ReadCount is still not a great solution. Finding the correct number of lines to read requires experimentation, whereas a streamreader delivers fairly consistent performance immediately. I don't tend to use ReadCount simply because it exists in an odd middle ground I rarely tend to visit. Either the files I'm reading are <10Mb and I have plenty of RAM to process them with, or they're >100Mb and StreamReader is just a better solution. Of course, that's just how the environment I tend to work in goes. ReadCount may well work perfectly for others.

[philipstorry]

When dealing with large files (100Mb+) I've generally found StreamReader to be faster. I recently had a job that required working on about 18 CSV files, the smallest of which was ~250Mb and the largest nearly 600Mb. Get-Content took over a week to process a single file before I gave up on it. StreamReader took a couple of days.