Get last field using awk substr

Question

I am trying to use awk to get the name of a file given the absolute path to the file  For example  when given the input path  home parent child filename I would like to get filename  I have tried   awk -F       print  5   input   which works perfectly  However  I am hard coding  5 which would be incorrect if my input has the following structure    home parent child1 child2 filename   So a generic solution requires always taking the last field  which will be the filename    Is there a simple way to do this with the awk substr function

User · Answer

Another option is to use bash parameter substitution     foo   home parent child filename    echo   foo      filename   foo   home parent child child2 filename    echo   foo      filename

User · Answer

I know I m like 3 years late on this but     you should consider parameter expansion  it s built-in and faster   if your input is in a var  let s say   var1  just do   var1       Look below    var1   home parent child1 filename    echo   var1      filename   var1   home parent child1 child2 filename    echo   var1      filename   var1   home parent child1 child2 child3 filename    echo   var1      filename

User · Answer

You can also use       sed -n  s              1        1 p    or      sed -n  s                  1 p

User · Answer

If you re open to a Perl solution  here one similar to fedorqui s awk solution   perl -F  -lane  print  F -1   input   -F  specifies   as the field separator  F -1  is the last element in the  F autosplit array

User · Answer

It should be a comment to the basename answer but I haven t enough point   If you do not use double quotes  basename will not work with path where there is space character     basename  home foo bar foo bar png bar   ok with quotes         basename   home foo bar foo bar png  bar png   file example    cat a  home parent child 1 child 2 child 3 filename1  home parent child 1 child2 filename2  home parent child1 filename3    while read b   do basename   b    done  lt  a filename1 filename2 filename3

User · Answer

Use the fact that awk splits the lines in fields based on a field separator  that you can define  Hence  defining the field separator to   you can say   awk -F       print  NF   input   as NF refers to the number of fields of the current record  printing  NF means printing the last one   So given a file like this    home parent child1 child2 child3 filename  home parent child1 child2 filename  home parent child1 filename   This would be the output     awk -F      print  NF   file filename filename filename

User · Answer

In this case it is better to use basename instead of awk      basename  home parent child1 child2 filename  filename

User · Answer

Like 5 years late  I know  thanks for all the proposals  I used to do this the following way     echo  home parent child1 child2 filename   rev   cut -d     -f1   rev filename   Glad to notice there are better manners

[unix] Get last field using awk substr

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