How to use AWK to print line with highest number?

Question

I have a question. Assuming I dump a file and do a grep for foo and comes out the result like this:

Foo-bar-120:'foo name 1'
Foo-bar-130:'foo name 2'
Foo-bar-1222:'foo name 3'

Etc.

All I want is trying to extract the foo name with largest number. For instance in this case, largest number is 1222 and the result I expect is foo name 3

Is there a easy way using awk and sed to achieve this? Rather than pull the number out line by line and loop through to find the largest number?

Answer 1

Code for awk:

awk -F[-:] '$3>a {a=$3; b=$4} END {print b}' file

---

$ cat file
Foo-bar-120:'foo name 1'
Foo-bar-130:'foo name 2'
Foo-bar-1222:'foo name 3'

$ awk -F[-:] '$3>a {a=$3; b=$4} END {print b}' file
'foo name 3'