Today I was looking for a command sequence to cut a string in two by predefined
delimiter (e.g. like cut does). I wanted to get the last field only and all
fields but the last as separate variables.
The proposed solutions I've found suggested using awk but I don't like it.
Here's a simple solution using cut and rev which can extract arbitrary
field counts from the end of the string.
$ echo 'buildvm-08.phx2.fedoraproject.org' | rev | cut -f1 -d. | rev
org
$ echo 'buildvm-08.phx2.fedoraproject.org' | rev | cut -f-2 -d. | rev
fedoraproject.org
$ echo 'buildvm-08.phx2.fedoraproject.org' | rev | cut -f-3 -d. | rev
phx2.fedoraproject.org
$ echo 'buildvm-08.phx2.fedoraproject.org' | rev | cut -f2- -d. | rev
buildvm-08.phx2.fedoraproject
$ echo 'buildvm-08.phx2.fedoraproject.org' | rev | cut -f3- -d. | rev
buildvm-08.phx2
$ echo 'buildvm-08.phx2.fedoraproject.org' | rev | cut -f4- -d. | rev
buildvm-08
The magic here is done by rev which reverses the order of characters in every
line. It comes with the util-linux-ng package.
Note to Self: util-linux-ng appears to contain more useful commands which I wasn't aware of. Need to RTFM a little bit.
Comments !