Print second last column/field in awk

Question

I want to print the second last column or field in awk. The number of fields is variable. I know that I should be able to use $NF but not sure how it can be use

Answer 1

You weren't far from the result! This does it:

awk '{NF--; print $NF}' file

This decrements the number of fields in one, so that $NF contains the former penultimate.

Test

Let's generate some numbers and print them on groups of 5:

$ seq 12 | xargs -n5
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10
11 12

Let's print the penultimate on each line:

$ seq 12 | xargs -n5 | awk '{NF--; print $NF}'
4
9
11