mjhjmtu

how to find the last word in file even after word there are empty lines

the case

I tried this to find the last word

tail -1 /tmp/requests.txt

but no output

I try the following approach

 awk 'END print $NF' /tmp/requests.txt

but no output

I capture the word only by tail -6 ( because the word was 6 empty lines before the end of the file

 tail -6 /tmp/requests.txt
 "IN_PROGRESS"

so what is the way to capture the last word in case we have empty space or not

expected results

 echo $Last_word
 IN_PROGRESS

Just start reading from the bottom and print the last word of the first line containing at least "something":

tac file | awk 'NFprint $NF; exit'

For example:

$ cat -vet file # note the spaces and tabs
hello$
bla ble bli$
 $
^I$
$ tac file | awk 'NFprint $NF; exit'
bli

If you happen to not have tac, just use the same logic when reading the file normally:

awk 'NFlast=$NF ENDprint last' file

That is, store the last word whenever there is "something" in a line. Finally, print the stored value.

Keep track of the last word of the last non-empty line and print it at the end:

awk '/S/ s=$NF; END print(s); '

No need to keep the whole file in memory to print its lines in reverse order or anything like that.

sed -n '$p' example.txt | awk 'print $NF'

This will get the last line of the file and display the last column in the last line.