Shell Programming and Scripting

Try this

Code:

$ tac text | awk -v RS= 'NR==1' | tac

tac is backwards cat. This will print the last line first and so on. Then, we need something that stops at paragraph ending (I assume you mean blank line). awk with a blank RS does this. There are many other ways to do this. We just need something that prints until the determined ending and then quits (or stops printing). Then of course we need to put the lines back in order again with tac.

Another way is to read the file twice with awk. The first time to find out where the last paragraph is, and the next time to print it.

Code:

$ awk -v RS= 'NR==FNR{last=FNR;next}FNR==last' text text

Many awks keep $0 in the END block. You can make it very simple this way:

Code:

$ awk 'END{print $0}' RS= text

Of course none of these use cat. But cat can't do much anything except print. There's not any logic.

cat does absolutely none of these things.

I suspect you have been practicing your useless use of cat instead. Please realize no command needs cat's help to read a file, making cat almost always redundant and pointless except for its actual purpose of concatenating files together.

Try:

Code:

awk '{p=$0} END{print p}' RS= file

which should work if empty lines between paragraphs always consist of two consecutive newlines.

More robust would be:

Code:

awk '{p=NF?p $0 RS:x} END{printf "%s",p}' file

Which should also work if there may be spaces or tabs on the otherwise empty lines separating the paragraphs..

Thank you for helping me with this guys, will look into tac and use it more