Can anyone explain to me how to get the last two chars' from each row of Column (each row being variable in length) using awk, some of the lines will be blank, I'll be running a paste after awking. So I need to keep the blanks where they are..so I can paste back all columns in the correct order

I see posts about stripping the last chars but nothing on getting the last chars

ie
GASTRO A9
NEONATALAF
GER.ASAB

GASTRO A9
ORSUR D3
GASTRO A9
GER.AS AB
GER.AP AB
NEONATALAF

output :

A9
AF
AB

A9
D3
A9
AB
AB
AF

Maybe something like....
grep -C 2> filename
? im not sure im trying to learn grep, awk, and sed so im not sure. if anyone can explain what i did wrong please do. How i came up with my solution is grep for searching -C because in man grep it says -C means print num lines of output context and 2> for 2 before the end of the line. I am most likely wrong but if someone can show the right way and explain why im wrong it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

sed -n '/STRING/,$p' filename|head -$n
Thats what i found while floating around on the forums now maybe you could change head to foot and possible make it so instead of the line and 2 more lines print, change it to make the last 2 character print? Idk maybe this will help you realize what you need or something? But can someone let me know whats wrong with this if it doesnt work maybe?

I can't think of anything in awk I'm afraid. I would have thought it'd be custom made for that job (in fact I'm sure someone who knows more will give you a very simple command, but I've drawn a blank), but with sed you could use:

sed 's/^.*\(..\)$/\1/' input_file

thanks for that I'll give it a try in the morning when I get to work...

since I dont have much experience in any thing: I will do this work in a simple but long way: so laughing is allowed looking at my code.

for file in `cat t40.txt|nawk '{print $3}'`;do
n=`echo $file|wc -C`
n=`expr $n - 1`
n1=`expr $n - 1`
echo $file|cut -c $n1-$n

I dont know why wc -C brings one more number than the real number of characters are there.

echo "this"|wc -C

this gives value 5 instead of 4.

thanks.