Print last matching line?

Question

Using awk, I would like to print the last matching line of a file. I would like only the matching line itself, not any range of lines. I can use a command like this

awk '/foo/' bar.txt

However this will print all matching lines, not just the last one.

Answer 1

You can save the value in a variable and then print it after processing the whole file:

awk '/foo/ {a=$0} END{print a}' file

Test

$ cat file
foo1
foo2
foo3
4
5
$ awk '/foo/ {a=$0} END{print a}' file
foo3