AWK

Print the last field of each line with awk...

The last field is indexed using a variable NF

that contains the number of fields for each row. We index it with a dollar sign, the resulting one-liner is simple.

awk '{ print $NF }' file

      

        
        
        
      

    

rs, cat and tail

Another way is to transfer the contents of the file, then grab the last line and transpose again (this is pretty easy to see).

Received pipe:

cat file | rs -T | tail -n1 | rs -T

      

        
        
        
      

    

cut and rev

Using cutand rev

we could also achieve this goal by changing direction, cutting off the first field, and then changing it again.

rev file | cut -d ' ' -f1 | rev

      

        
        
        
      

    

SED

Using sed we will just remove all characters until a space is found with regex ^.* [^ ]*$

... This regular expression means the start of a line ^

, followed by any sequence of characters .*

and a space

. The rest is a sequence of non-whitespace [^ ]*

until the end of the line $

. Saddle one-liner:

sed 's/^.* \([^ ]*\)$/\1/' file

      

        
        
        
      

    

Where we strip the last part (between \(

and \)

) and put it back for the whole string. \1

means the first found group, which is the last field.

Notes

• As Ed Norton aptly pointed out, we just can't catch the group and remove the old part of the regex. This can be done as easily as

  sed 's/.* //' file
  
  
  
  Which is surprisingly less complicated and elegant.

• For more information see man sed
  
  and man awk
  
  .