Bash. awk last column with possible spaces

Question

I have a dynamic output. Like this sometimes:

F8:XX:94:XX:C2:XX    1    39%     No    ANY_NAME
A2:XX:34:XX:E8:XX    6    42%     Yes    ANY_OTHER_NAME
D1:XX:78:XX:A1:XX    6    24%     No    MORESTUFF

Or like this other times:

F8:XX:94:XX:C2:XX    1    433     39%     No    ANY NAME
A2:XX:34:XX:E8:XX    6    232     42%     No    ANY_OTHER_NAME
D1:XX:78:XX:A1:XX    6    112     22%     Yes    MORE STUFF

As you can see the last column is what I want but it can contain spaces or not and the number of columns is dynamic.

I need to capture the value of the last column always in case of having no spaces or having multiple spaces. Sometimes, the column number is dynamic too but the data I want is always in last place having spaces or not. The column before this data it's always a "Yes" or "No" (not sure if this can help).

Is there a way to do it with awk? This is what I have actually:

myvar=$(echo "${line}" | awk '{print $NF}')

But with this is taking just the last part after a space, not the complete data. So this is working only if the data has no spaces.

What I want is to get always the last data complete with its spaces in case of containing them. Any help?

Answer 1

If you're sure that the data you care about can never have a run of more than one space then use that as your field separator instead.

awk -F '\t| {2,}' ...

Answer 2

With GNU awk for \s and \S shorthand:

$ awk '{sub(/[^%]+%\s+\S+\s+/,"")}1' file
ANY_NAME
ANY_OTHER_NAME
MORESTUFF
ANY NAME
ANY_OTHER_NAME
MORE STUFF
oh   No     lots of    spaces

With any awk:

$ awk '{sub(/[^%]+%[[:space:]]+[^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+/,"")}1' file
ANY_NAME
ANY_OTHER_NAME
MORESTUFF
ANY NAME
ANY_OTHER_NAME
MORE STUFF
oh   No     lots of    spaces

or with any sed that supports -E for EREs (e.g. GNU or OSX/BSD seds):

$ sed -E 's/[^%]+%[[:space:]]+[^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+//' file
ANY_NAME
ANY_OTHER_NAME
MORESTUFF
ANY NAME
ANY_OTHER_NAME
MORE STUFF
oh   No     lots of    spaces

The above was run on this input file:

$ cat file
F8:XX:94:XX:C2:XX    1    39%     No    ANY_NAME
A2:XX:34:XX:E8:XX    6    42%     Yes    ANY_OTHER_NAME
D1:XX:78:XX:A1:XX    6    24%     No    MORESTUFF
F8:XX:94:XX:C2:XX    1    433     39%     No    ANY NAME
A2:XX:34:XX:E8:XX    6    232     42%     No    ANY_OTHER_NAME
D1:XX:78:XX:A1:XX    6    112     22%     Yes    MORE STUFF
D1:XX:78:XX:A1:XX    6    112     22%     Yes    oh   No     lots of    spaces

wrt your comments, here is the first script handling the input file contents being passed to it 1 line at a time from a pipe:

$ while IFS= read -r line; do
    echo "$line" | awk '{sub(/[^%]+%\s+\S+\s+/,"")}1'
done < file
ANY_NAME
ANY_OTHER_NAME
MORESTUFF
ANY NAME
ANY_OTHER_NAME
MORE STUFF
oh   No     lots of    spaces

All of the other scripts can be used exactly the same way.