Adding an approach to this old question just for the fun of it:
$ cat input.file # file containing input that needs to be processed
a;b;c;d;e
1;2;3;4;5
no delimiter here
124;adsf;15454
foo;bar;is;null;info
$ cat tmp.sh # showing off the script to do the job
#!/bin/bash
delim=';'
while read -r line; do
while [[ "$line" =~ "$delim" ]]; do
line=$(cut -d"$delim" -f 2- <<<"$line")
done
echo "$line"
done < input.file
$ ./tmp.sh # output of above script/processed input file
e
5
no delimiter here
15454
info
Besides bash, only cut is used. Well, and echo, I guess.
This is the only solution possible for using nothing but cut:
echo "s.t.r.i.n.g." | cut -d'.' -f2- [repeat_following_part_forever_or_until_out_of_memory:] | cut -d'.' -f2-
Using this solution, the number of fields can indeed be unknown and vary from time to time. However as line length must not exceed LINE_MAX characters or fields, including the new-line character, then an arbitrary number of fields can never be part as a real condition of this solution.
Yes, a very silly solution but the only one that meets the criterias I think.
I realized if we just ensure a trailing delimiter exists, it works. So in my case I have comma and whitespace delimiters. I add a space at the end;
$ ans="a, b"
$ ans+=" "; echo ${ans} | tr ',' ' ' | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f2
b
the following implements A friend's suggestion
#!/bin/bash
rcut(){
nu="$( echo $1 | cut -d"$DELIM" -f 2- )"
if [ "$nu" != "$1" ]
then
rcut "$nu"
else
echo "$nu"
fi
}
$ export DELIM=.
$ rcut a.b.c.d
d
An alternative using perl would be:
perl -pe 's/(.*) (.*)$/$2/' file
where you may change \t for whichever the delimiter of file is
Use a parameter expansion. This is much more efficient than any kind of external command, cut (or grep) included.
data=foo,bar,baz,qux
last=${data##*,}
See BashFAQ #100 for an introduction to native string manipulation in bash.
If you have a file named filelist.txt that is a list paths such as the following: c:/dir1/dir2/file1.h c:/dir1/dir2/dir3/file2.h
then you can do this: rev filelist.txt | cut -d"/" -f1 | rev
There are multiple ways. You may use this too.
echo "Your string here"| tr ' ' '\n' | tail -n1
> here
Obviously, the blank space input for tr command should be replaced with the delimiter you need.
If your input string doesn't contain forward slashes then you can use basename and a subshell:
$ basename "$(echo 'maps.google.com' | tr '.' '/')"
This doesn't use sed or awk but it also doesn't use cut either, so I'm not quite sure if it qualifies as an answer to the question as its worded.
This doesn't work well if processing input strings that can contain forward slashes. A workaround for that situation would be to replace forward slash with some other character that you know isn't part of a valid input string. For example, the pipe (|) character is also not allowed in filenames, so this would work:
$ basename "$(echo 'maps.google.com/some/url/things' | tr '/' '|' | tr '.' '/')" | tr '|' '/'
Without awk ?... But it's so simple with awk:
echo 'maps.google.com' | awk -F. '{print $NF}'
AWK is a way more powerful tool to have in your pocket. -F if for field separator NF is the number of fields (also stands for the index of the last)
It is not possible using just cut. Here is a way using grep:
grep -o '[^,]*$'
Replace the comma for other delimiters.
Source: Stackoverflow.com