How to get second last field from a cut command

Question

I have a set of data as input and need the second last field based on deleimiter. The lines may have different numbers of delimiter. How can I get second last field ?

Answer 1

There's no need to use cut, rev, or any other tools external to bash here at all. Just read each line into an array, and pick out the piece you want:

while IFS=, read -r -a entries; do
  printf '%s\n' "${entries[${#entries[@]} - 2]}"
done 

Doing this in pure bash is far faster than starting up a pipeline, at least for reasonably small inputs. For large inputs, the better tool is awk.