req: please review one-liner 1

[Kipnep70]

I've written a one-liner and it is producing the results I want, but I'm not confident that it is written correctly.

I'm trying to print the first field of each record and omit the last line of a file.

cat clients | awk '{a=0; if (a > $NF) print $1}'

Then I realized that $NF represents the Number of Fields in the current record. So I'm not sure how this is working correctly since the last line has more the 0 fields.

Is there a better way to write/accomplish this?

Thanks,

 

[feherke]

Hi

Then I realized that $NF represents the Number of Fields in the current record.

Wrong. [tt]NF[/tt] is the number of fields; [tt]$NF[/tt] is the value of [tt]NF[/tt]^th field.

What you wrote can be written as this :

awk '0>$NF{print $1}' clients

Which means, if the last field's value is less than zero, print the first field.

I'm trying to print the first field of each record and omit the last line of a file.

That is a completely different story. You have to store the value until you find out that it was not the last line.

awk 'NR>1{print l}{l=$1}' clients

Tested with [tt]gawk[/tt] and [tt]mawk[/tt].

And please avoid UUOC. [tt]awk[/tt] is able to read a file, no need to spoon-feed it.


Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/