Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello:

I am trying to perform a certain action if the current record is the last line of the input file. But I am unable to figure out how to determine the last line of a file in awk.

I need to do something like this:
awk '{ if (lastline == NR) Do Something}' myfile.txt

I have tried the following in a Korn Shell script.

lastRec=`wc -l myfile.txt | awk '{print $1}'`
print $lastRec

awk -v aLastRec="$lastRec" '{if (NR == $aLastRec) print NR ": This is the last record!"}'

But I could not get it to recognize the $lastRec or $aLastRec.

Can you please help?

Thanks.

You can use the END statement to access the last record of the file:

Code:

awk  'END{ print "this is the last line :  ", $0, "  | and NR  is -> " NR, "do something else here..." }' myfile.txt

And don't use $ sign inside awk:

Code:

lastRec=`awk 'END{print NR}' myfile.txt`

awk -v aLastRec="$lastRec" '{if (NR == aLastRec) ... }' myfile.txt

Cool. I overlooked the $ error in awk part of the script. Your suggested solution works! Thanks a lot for your help Rubin.

tail can do the job here

Code:

test `tail -1 data.file`=="pattern" && echo OK || echo NOK