UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Sorry, in Solaris od doesn't support -w option. So try this:

Code:

tail -1 input_file | od -An -t oC | grep -c "012$"

It works perfectly.

Thank you very much, Sir.

One last Question:
I was trying to understand the command and had 1 question:

1. "tail" obtains the last line of the file and passes to the "od" command
2. "od" obtains the last character of the file and passes to "grep" command
3. grep -c "012$" returns the count of '1' or '0' depending upon the search of the only character.

1. what does "012$" signify? I saw that it also works when I just put grep -c "012"

2. Can you please let me know the significance of $ and is it mandatory or optional character in this situation and

3. what does "012" signify and how does it correspond to the new line charcter.

Again I would like to thank you for solving my query.

The string "012" is the octal code of the newline character (\n). If you see "man ascii" you can find it.
od just prints out the octal code for every character it finds on the last line of input_file (tail -1).

The dollar sign in grep expression means: match the string "012" only at the end of the line. If "012" is found in the middle of the string returned by od, the result is 0.
Well, it is impossible to find the newline character in the middle of a line, so the regexp "012" or "012$" in this case doesn't matter. But I prefer to be precise