awk help

[Kevin Wright]

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

[John Poff · Accepted solution]

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

[Kevin Wright]

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.