Print second last column field in awk

Question

I want to print the second last column or field in awk  The number of fields is variable  I know that I should be able to use  NF but not sure how it can be used   And this does not seem to work   awk     print    NF--

User · Answer

If you have many columns and want to print all but not the three cloumns in the last  then this might help  awk     NF      NF-1       NF-2       print  0

User · Answer

First decrements the value and then print it -  awk     print   --NF    file   OR  rev file cut -d     -f2 rev

User · Answer

Small addition to Chris Kannon  accepted answer  only print if there actually is a second last column     echo         awk  NF  amp  amp  NF-1   print     NF-1       echo 1       awk  NF  amp  amp  NF-1   print     NF-1       echo 1 2     awk  NF  amp  amp  NF-1   print     NF-1       echo 1 2 3   awk  NF  amp  amp  NF-1   print     NF-1

User · Answer

You weren t far from the result  This does it   awk   NF--  print  NF   file   This decrements the number of fields in one  so that  NF contains the former penultimate   Test  Let s generate some numbers and print them on groups of 5     seq 12   xargs -n5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12   Let s print the penultimate on each line     seq 12   xargs -n5   awk   NF--  print  NF   4 9 11

User · Answer

awk   print   NF-1      Should work

User · Answer

awk     print     NF-1       file

User · Answer

Perl solution similar to Chris Kannon s awk solution   perl -lane  print  F   F-1   file   These command-line options are used    n loop around every line of the input file  do not automatically print every line l removes newlines before processing  and adds them back in afterwards a autosplit mode     split input lines into the  F array   Defaults to splitting on whitespace e execute the perl code   The  F autosplit array starts at index  0  while awk fields start with  1    F is the number of elements in  F

User · Answer

It s simplest    awk   print  --NF      The reason the original  NF-- didn t work is because the expression is evaluated before the decrement  whereas my prefix decrement is performed before evaluation

User · Answer

Did you tried to start from right to left by using the rev command   In this case you just need to print the 2nd column   seq 12   xargs -n5   rev   awk    print  2     rev 4 9 11

[awk] Print second last column/field in awk

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