Editing large log files on a full disk

[tanith]

I've been trying to troubleshoot an application on a Win2008 server which once in a blue moon suddenly writes hundreds of GB of data into one of its log files over a short period of time. That crashes the application and uses up the entire disk it is installed on except for maybe 2 GB space left.

The problem is that, without looking at the file, I can't tell what caused the problem in the application. However, there's no way notepad, wordpad, or any other text software I know of will be able to open that log file. We can just delete the log and restart the application and it'll work fine for another month, but that's not a long term solution.

There's not enough room on C: or any other disk/network disk/external disk available to copy the file to. You can't zip it (since zip keeps the original copy and then makes an additional zipped one) and most file splitting utilities are the same.

Now on Linux or Unix, I think you'd still be able to tail and look at the end of the file without having to try and load the whole thing into memory. Is there some application out there that can do the equivalent available for Windows? Or maybe just chop off the last 1-10 MB of the log file?

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

I've had similar problems in the past, and I remember having used winvi to look at such files in read-only mode.