How to split a string in shell and get the last field

Question

Suppose I have the string 1:2:3:4:5 and I want to get its last field (5 in this case). How do I do that using Bash? I tried cut, but I

Answer 1

For those that comfortable with Python, https://github.com/Russell91/pythonpy is a nice choice to solve this problem.

$ echo "a:b:c:d:e" | py -x 'x.split(":")[-1]'

From the pythonpy help: -x treat each row of stdin as x.

With that tool, it is easy to write python code that gets applied to the input.