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Find out the last line of a file: Using sed (stream editor): sed -n '$p' fileName. Using tail: tail -1 fileName. using awk: awk 'END { print }' fileName.
substr(str, start, l) This function returns the substring of string str, starting at index start of length l. If length is omitted, the suffix of str starting at index start is returned.
$NF stores the last column by default, in awk. Here is the command to delete last column of ls -l command's output. In this case, we specify awk command to output all fields where NF contains the number of fields in the input. We subtract 1 from it, to prevent the last field from being counted & printed.
Use the fact that awk splits the lines in fields based on a field separator, that you can define. Hence, defining the field separator to / you can say:
awk -F "/" '{print $NF}' input
as NF refers to the number of fields of the current record, printing $NF means printing the last one.
So given a file like this:
/home/parent/child1/child2/child3/filename
/home/parent/child1/child2/filename
/home/parent/child1/filename
This would be the output:
$ awk -F"/" '{print $NF}' file
filename
filename
filename
In this case it is better to use basename instead of awk:
$ basename /home/parent/child1/child2/filename
filename
If you're open to a Perl solution, here one similar to fedorqui's awk solution:
perl -F/ -lane 'print $F[-1]' input
-F/ specifies / as the field separator$F[-1] is the last element in the @F autosplit array
Another option is to use bash parameter substitution.
$ foo="/home/parent/child/filename"
$ echo ${foo##*/}
filename
$ foo="/home/parent/child/child2/filename"
$ echo ${foo##*/}
filename
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