please help

[Ken Lee_1]

I am doing a script which I want to grep the last username of a file. Assuming below is a list of username which contained in a file with delimiter ":". (It is continuous line) With what command so that I can get the last username "mutvomo".

labdaulrr:lsaariunb:crupafng:ltafmbuna:mrginilas:mthgerlas:mlutthers:maeskum:mutvomo:

[Vincent Farrugia]

Hi,

If the sentence is of fixed length, you can use the cut command as follows:

cut -f10 -d:

Replace 10 with the number of the field you wish, e.g. if the last field is the 15th field, replace 10 by 15.

Hope it helps,
Vince

[Ken Lee_1]

The length of the file is not fixed. What should I do now?

[Vincent Farrugia]

Hi,

You can count the number of : in the file first, that assumes that the result is the numbner of usernames resent in the file.

This would be done using wc

usernames=$(wc -c :)

cut -f$usernames -d:

Dunno whether it works like this, we don't have power on the servers at the moment, so I didn't have time to check the syntax. It should be something like that though.

Hope it helps,
Vince

[Vincent Farrugia]

Sorry, the wc command doesn't work like that...

I'll have to come up with something else.

SORRY

[Satish Y · Accepted solution]

Try this,

awk -F":" '{print $(NF-1)}' myfile

Cheers...
Satish.