UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi

I have got a log file which is like:

id status
---------------------
12345 status1.true
12345 status2.true
12345 status3.false
12345 status4.true
23452 status5.true
23452 status6.true
23452 status7.false
65243 status9.true
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
and so on

The id field shows the id of an event while as the status field shows
the status of the id to be true or false.
For a particular id I want to know the status as true or false.
The log is sorted by timestamp
Eg. here in my log the status for 12345 would be true
while as the status for 23452 would be false
and for 65243 it would be true.

Right now I have to manually look at the last entry for the
particular id to find it's status.
Is there another way around to do this.

Regards
enc

grep idnum logfile|tail -1

like this...
logfile has
12345 status1.true
12345 status2.true
12345 status3.false
12345 status4.true
23452 status5.true
23452 status6.true
23452 status7.false
65243 status9.true

$ grep 23452 logfile |tail -1

will give you the last occurance of 23452 only - you could further do your testing of true or false by pulling the true or false with awk

$ grep 23452 logfile |tail -1|awk -F. '{print $2}'

Or do it all with awk..

awk -v id=23452 '$1==id{x=$2}END{print x}' logfile