How to print the last field in a file in Linux/Unix Shell scripting

Let us see how to print the last field alone from a file which contains several fields.

Let's say that the input is the below file.



$ cat priority.txt Bash:P:Sun:7 NW:F:Mon:4 DB:P:Tue:8 SE:P:Fri:8


Now we need to Print the last field. i.e.

The required Output would be:
----------------------------------
7
4
8
8

We can do this by three ways.

1) The normal awk way of doing it:

$ awk 'BEGIN {FS=":"} {print $NF}' priority.txt

2) Using sed:

$ sed -n 's/.*://;p' priority.txt

3) Using grep:

$ grep -o '[^:]*$' priority.txt