$1
is the first argument.$@
is all of them.
How can I find the last argument passed to a shell script?
$1
is the first argument.$@
is all of them.
How can I find the last argument passed to a shell script?
This is a bit of a hack:
for last; do true; done echo $last
This one is also pretty portable (again, should work with bash, ksh and sh) and it doesn't shift the arguments, which could be nice.
It uses the fact that for
implicitly loops over the arguments if you don't tell it what to loop over, and the fact that for loop variables aren't scoped: they keep the last value they were set to.
This is Bash-only:
echo "${@: -1}"
The simplest answer for bash 3.0 or greater is
_last=${!#} # *indirect reference* to the $# variable # or _last=$BASH_ARGV # official built-in (but takes more typing :)
That's it.
$ cat lastarg #!/bin/bash # echo the last arg given: _last=${!#} echo $_last _last=$BASH_ARGV echo $_last for x; do echo $x done
Output is:
$ lastarg 1 2 3 4 "5 6 7" 5 6 7 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
$ set quick brown fox jumps $ echo ${*: -1:1} # last argument jumps $ echo ${*: -1} # or simply jumps $ echo ${*: -2:1} # next to last fox
The space is necessary so that it doesnt get interpreted as a default value.
Use indexing combined with length of:
echo ${@:${#@}}
The following will work for you. The @ is for array of arguments. : means at. $# is the length of the array of arguments. So the result is the last element:
${@:$#}
Example:
function afunction{ echo ${@:$#} } afunction -d -o local 50 #Outputs 50
Found this when looking to separate the last argument from all the previous one(s). Whilst some of the answers do get the last argument, they're not much help if you need all the other args as well. This works much better:
heads=${@:1:$(($# - 1))} tail=${@:$#}
This works in all POSIX-compatible shells:
eval last=\${$#}
Source: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part2/section-12.html
If you are using Bash >= 3.0
echo ${BASH_ARGV[0]}
Here is mine solution:
eval
Code:
ntharg() { shift $1 printf '%s\n' "$1" } LAST_ARG=`ntharg $# "$@"`
shift `expr $# - 1` echo "$1"
This shifts the arguments by the number of arguments minus 1, and returns the first (and only) remaining argument, which will be the last one.
I only tested in bash, but it should work in sh and ksh as well.
If you want to do it in a non-destructive way, one way is to pass all the arguments to a function and return the last one:
#!/bin/bash last() { if [[ $# -ne 0 ]] ; then shift $(expr $# - 1) echo "$1" #else #do something when no arguments fi } lastvar=$(last "$@") echo $lastvar echo "$@" pax> ./qq.sh 1 2 3 a b b 1 2 3 a b
If you don't actually care about keeping the other arguments, you don't need it in a function but I have a hard time thinking of a situation where you would never want to keep the other arguments unless they've already been processed, in which case I'd use the process/shift/process/shift/... method of sequentially processing them.
I'm assuming here that you want to keep them because you haven't followed the sequential method. This method also handles the case where there's no arguments, returning "". You could easily adjust that behavior by inserting the commented-out else
clause.
For tcsh:
set X = `echo $* | awk -F " " '{print $NF}'` somecommand "$X"
I'm quite sure this would be a portable solution, except for the assignment.
A solution using eval
:
last=$(eval "echo \$$#") echo $last
After reading the answers above I wrote a Q&D shell script (should work on sh and bash) to run g++ on PGM.cpp to produce executable image PGM. It assumes that the last argument on the command line is the file name (.cpp is optional) and all other arguments are options.
#!/bin/sh if [ $# -lt 1 ] then echo "Usage: `basename $0` [opt] pgm runs g++ to compile pgm[.cpp] into pgm" exit 2 fi OPT= PGM= # PGM is the last argument, all others are considered options for F; do OPT="$OPT $PGM"; PGM=$F; done DIR=`dirname $PGM` PGM=`basename $PGM .cpp` # put -o first so it can be overridden by -o specified in OPT set -x g++ -o $DIR/$PGM $OPT $DIR/$PGM.cpp
The following will set LAST
to last argument without changing current environment:
LAST=$({ shift $(($#-1)) echo $1 }) echo $LAST
If other arguments are no longer needed and can be shifted it can be simplified to:
shift $(($#-1)) echo $1
For portability reasons following:
shift $(($#-1));
can be replaced with:
shift `expr $# - 1`
Replacing also $()
with backquotes we get:
LAST=`{ shift \`expr $# - 1\` echo $1 }` echo $LAST
echo $argv[$#argv]
Now I just need to add some text because my answer was too short to post. I need to add more text to edit.
I found @AgileZebra's answer (plus @starfry's comment) the most useful, but it sets heads
to a scalar. An array is probably more useful:
heads=( "${@:1:$(($# - 1))}" ) tail=${@:${#@}}
#! /bin/sh next=$1 while [ -n "${next}" ] ; do last=$next shift next=$1 done echo $last
This is part of my copy function:
eval echo $(echo '$'"$#")
To use in scripts, do this:
a=$(eval echo $(echo '$'"$#"))
Explanation (most nested first):
$(echo '$'"$#")
returns $[nr]
where [nr]
is the number of parameters. E.g. the string $123
(unexpanded).echo $123
returns the value of 123rd parameter, when evaluated.eval
just expands $123
to the value of the parameter, e.g. last_arg
. This is interpreted as a string and returned.Works with Bash as of mid 2015.
Try the below script to find last argument
# cat arguments.sh #!/bin/bash if [ $# -eq 0 ] then echo "No Arguments supplied" else echo $* > .ags sed -e 's/ /\n/g' .ags | tac | head -n1 > .ga echo "Last Argument is: `cat .ga`" fi
Output:
# ./arguments.sh No Arguments supplied # ./arguments.sh testing for the last argument value Last Argument is: value
Thanks.
There is a much more concise way to do this. Arguments to a bash script can be brought into an array, which makes dealing with the elements much simpler. The script below will always print the last argument passed to a script.
argArray=( "$@" ) # Add all script arguments to argArray arrayLength=${#argArray[@]} # Get the length of the array lastArg=$((arrayLength - 1)) # Arrays are zero based, so last arg is -1 echo ${argArray[$lastArg]}
Sample output
$ ./lastarg.sh 1 2 buckle my shoe shoe
This format can worked in Slackware and Cygwin.
"${x[@]:(-1)}", if used with $@, "${@:(-1)}"
It means is: ${@:(N)}, will return all element after N index.(include N), -1 is thelast.
Using parameter expansion (delete matched beginning):
args="$@" last=${args##* }
It's also easy to get all before last:
prelast=${args% *}