The simple solution with awk is doing:
awk ‘{print $NF}’
This is useful when like in the following we want to list just files skipping directories:
ls -l | awk ‘NR!=1 && !/^d/ {print $NF}
There are other options of course, take a look at this example from a nice collection of bash and unix tips
This is more of quick reminder for myself on the difficult task of escaping quotes and running an awk or sed command inside the bash command line. I solved the issue in my case using the octal representation of a single quote (\47), taken from here, where more options are shown.
Having previously accommodated the list of stale links with their replacements in a two columns format that looked like:
http://addressOld.com http://www.goodWorkingOne.com
http://addressOld2.com http://www.goodWorkingOne2.com
etc…
I used the following:
awk '{print "UPDATE library SET url=\47"$2"\47 WHERE url=\47"$1"\47;"}'
to correctly generated what I wanted sql-postgres statements to update the links table:
UPDATE links SET url='http://goodWorkingOne.com' WHERE url='http://addressOld.com';
A quick note so I can remember the way to skip some fields at the beginning of a line printing the rest without further specifications (as it’d be tedious to have to write say: awk '{print $2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9...$n}')
The solution found here explains a simple way: just to print the substring starting from the nth field.
In my example where I pull the history of commands filtering for “find” I skip the first field in order to output without the command number:
history | grep find | awk '{print substr($0, index($0,$2))}'
(for what it matters, turns to be convenient for me inside the emacs shell, as I can select the line I want doing fewer keystrokes:C-a SPC, activates the selection mark at the beginning, C-e extends selection to the end of the line and C-w copies it to customize and reuse it)
Later observation:
Actually, I found a simpler (hence, better) way using the cut command:
history | grep find | cut -d ' ' -f3-
where “-d ‘ ‘” is the separation field and -f3- means from the third field on. With cut you don’t need to know which is the last field, leaving the second part of the range empty implies “up to the end”.
Found a well written “sed by example” article with practical examples (specially in part 3).
There are plenty of good resources out there, today I partially checked a thorough intro and tutorial written by Bruce Barnett .
And this collection of sed oneliners has useful stuff as well to get you covered.
