Bash script: how do I select second-to-last argument in a list
 

I am trying to write a bash script that pulls out the second-to-last argument in a list of fields in a text file. The number of fields is variable for each line - eg.

arg1 arg2 arg3 arg4 arg5
arg1 arg2 arg3 arg4 arg5 arg6
arg1 arg2 arg3 arg4

In this case I'd like the script to pull out:

arg4
arg5
arg3

I can use awk to print out the first n arguments ie (cat filename | awk '{print @2}'), but is there an easy way to pull out a certain number of arguments from the end?

Hi.

Yup. 'NF' contains the number of fields in the record, sowill print the second last field.

Dave

Many thanks for the speedy answer. I'll use this forum more in the future for such questions!