How to display the last word in every line of a file in Unix

In this Blogpost we will see and learn how to display the last word in every line of a file. Well, this one is pretty easy if you know the meaning of $NF (number of fields) in awk.

Syntaxes:

awk '{print $NF}
awk -F: '{print $NF}'

NF for awk represents the number of fields (e.g., 6), so $NF then represents the value of the rightmost field (e.g., $6).

$ cat numbers
1 2 3 4 5 6
one two three four five six
$ awk '{print $NF}' numbers
6
six

This trick makes it easy for you to print the rightmost word in a file even when each line might contain a different number of words. If you want to print some other word relative to the end of each line, you can still use NF as an anchor for your field selection. In this command, we select the next to last field by using NF-1.

$ awk '{print $(NF-1)}' numbers
5
five

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