[lug] Something seemingly simple

[Hugh Brown]

Daniel Webb wrote:
> I want something to take a space-delimited string and return only the last
> field.  The caveat: the "last field" can have any character except NULL.  How
> can I extract this field from a bash variable or from a file that contains
> such an entry?
> 
> Most obvious ways (bash's 'read' internal, cut, sed) all normally end
> searching for a pattern when they find a newline.  I'm thinking something like
> perl's s///s construction, but I don't want a Perl dependency.  Is it possible
> with the standard GNU toolkit?
> 


You might also look at this 
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-awk2.html

Hugh