How to display only the last line of a listing ?

Question

Supposed I make a listing and sort the files by its temporal attribute:

ls -ltr

-rwxrwxrwx 1 bla bla 4096 Feb 01 20:10 foo1
-rwxrwxrwx 1 bla bla 4096 Feb 01 20:12 foo2
.
.
.
-rwxrwxrwx 1 bla bla 4096 Mar 05 13:25 foo1000

What should I add behind the ls -ltr in a pipe chain in order to obtain only the last line of the listing ? I know there are sed and awk, but I do not know how to use them, I only know what they can do.

Why not parse ls (and what to do instead)?, http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs — phuclv, Feb 06 '23 at 01:22

score 29 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 26 '15 at 22:32

29

Since you asked about sed specifically,

ls -ltr | sed '$!d'

answered Mar 26 '15 at 22:32

steeldriver

81,074

thank you, i am now a little proud having learned some concrete sed. – Abdul Al Hazred Mar 26 '15 at 22:35
6

Also, sed -n '$p' does the same thing, but really tail -1 is the right tool for the job. – imiric Jul 09 '17 at 19:39

Stephen Kitt · Answer 2 · 2020-05-18T09:01:23.157

15

You're looking for tail :

ls -ltr | tail -n 1

This will display only the last line of ls -ltr's output. You can control the number of lines by changing the value after -n; if you omit -n 1 entirely you'll get ten lines.

The benefit of using tail instead of sed is that tail starts at the end of the file until it reaches a newline, while sed would have to traverse the whole file until it reaches the end, and only then return the text since the last newline was found.

edited May 18 '20 at 09:01

answered Mar 26 '15 at 22:17

Stephen Kitt

434,908

tail -1 ... -n is redundant. – dhchdhd Sep 20 '18 at 00:00
2

@Barry tail -1 is deprecated (see the “RATIONALE” section of the POSIX specification for tail, or the last part of the GNU tails manual); it still works in this case, for now, but it’s best to avoid using it in examples. – Stephen Kitt Sep 20 '18 at 04:13

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 26 '15 at 22:23

5

With awk:

ls -ltr | awk 'END { print }'

answered Mar 26 '15 at 22:23

taliezin

9,275

How to display only the last line of a listing ?

3 Answers3

Linked