topic Re: awk help in Operating System - HP-UX

awk help

Kevin Wright — Mon, 16 Jul 2001 15:57:36 GMT

I am writing a script to kill background jobs using jobs -l and using awk to get the process id's..however, the first two lines have a + and a - in the second field, so if I awk '{print $3}', I get the first two PID's and then for the last two I get 'Running'..anyone know of anyway around this?
[4] + 18982 Running
[3] - 18981 Running
[2] 18980 Running
[1] 18979 Running

Re: awk help

John Poff — Mon, 16 Jul 2001 16:13:23 GMT

Hello,

I played with awk and I got this line to work:

awk '{i=NF-1; print $i}'

The NF variable is the number of fields on the input line. This sets the variable 'i' to one less than NF and prints it.

JP

Re: awk help

Kevin Wright — Mon, 16 Jul 2001 16:16:58 GMT

Thanks for the reply, I just got this to work
awk '{print $(NF -3)}'
because NF is actually the command field in the jobs output.