Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Read Nth column (e.g. 2nd column) of a row of data in a file that has a specific word (e.g. HOME) on that row and extract the last delimited value for the specified delimiter (e.g. /)

Terminal - Read Nth column (e.g. 2nd column) of a row of data in a file that has a specific word (e.g. HOME) on that row and extract the last delimited value for the specified delimiter (e.g. /)
grep 'HOME.*' data.txt | awk '{print $2}' | awk '{FS="/"}{print $NF}' OR USE ALTERNATE WAY awk '/HOME/ {print $2}' data.txt | awk -F'/' '{print $NF}'
2009-03-05 07:28:26
User: rommelsharma
Functions: awk grep
-3
Up
Down
Read Nth column (e.g. 2nd column) of a row of data in a file that has a specific word (e.g. HOME) on that row and extract the last delimited value for the specified delimiter (e.g. /)

grep 'HOME.*' data.txt | awk '{print $2}' | awk '{FS="/"}{print $NF}'

OR

awk '/HOME/ {print $2}' data.txt | awk -F'/' '{print $NF}'

In this example, we are having a text file that is having several entries like:

---

c1 c2 c3 c4

this is some data

HOME /dir1/dir2/.../dirN/somefile1.xml

HOME /dir1/dir2/somefile2.xml

some more data

---

for lines starting with HOME, we are extracting the second field that is a 'file path with file name', and from that we need to get the filename only and ignore the slash delimited path.

The output would be:

somefile1.xml

somefile2.xml

(In case you give a -ive - pls give the reasons as well and enlighten the souls :-) )

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

Another way to do it, this time with sed

grep 'HOME.*' data.txt | sed -e 's/.*\/\(.*\)$/\1/'

Comment by OJM 219 weeks and 6 days ago

Why so complicated?

awk -F',' '/HOME/ {print $NF}' data.txt
Comment by lux 219 weeks and 6 days ago

@lux: Typo: awk -F'/' '/HOME/ {print $NF}' data.txt

Very nice solution BTW.

Comment by OJM 219 weeks and 6 days ago

Thanks - inputs appreciated very much and very useful to me.

Comment by rommelsharma 219 weeks and 6 days ago

If file has entries like the following, with 2nd column having the req. data:

---

this is some data

HOME /dir1/dir2/.../dirN/somefile1.xml some more data

HOME /dir1/dir2/somefile2.xml

some more data

---

then

awk -F'/' '/HOME/ {print $NF}' data.txt

would give:

somefile1.xml some more data

somefile2.xml

In such cases, we would need to use:

awk '/HOME/ {print $2}' data.txt | awk -F'/' '{print $NF}'

to get only the last delimited value from the second column.

Comment by rommelsharma 219 weeks and 6 days ago

awk is grep on steroids. As shown in comment #2, the search term can always be used in awk.

awk '/search_term/' {print $1}' file

rather than

grep search_term file | awk '{print $1}'

This reminds me of the overly-redundant cat | grep scenario:

cat file | grep search_term
Comment by atoponce 219 weeks and 3 days ago

oops, i added a misalainged quote

awk '/search_term/ {print $1}' file
Comment by atoponce 219 weeks and 3 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts