Hi, I am trying to find out how to remove the last word in a file. For example, a line in a file will contain: one two three four And I want to remove the word "four" from the line. Thanks!

sed '$s/ *\([^ ]* *\)$//' data.file

Nails, Can you please explain what sed does? I'm just unfamiliar with that command. Is there another way using ksh commands?

sed stands for Stream EDitor. It's a common utility used to edit text files from the command line or a script. This particular example prints all lines, but the last. On the last line it uses a regular expression to print everything, but the last field. What is your definition of 'ksh commands?' You can't use any external commands. There is a way, but first I need the total number of lines in the file. I'd normally use: flen=$(wc -l < data.file) but this loop works: flen=0 while read line do ((flen+=1)) done < data.file Now, use this loop: cnt=0 while read line do ((cnt+=1)) if [[ $cnt -eq $flen ]] then # last line # set the separate fields as command line arguments set - $(echo "$line") cnt2=1 while [[ $cnt2 < $# ]] do argchar=$(eval echo \$$cnt2) printf "%s " $argchar ((cnt2+=1)) done else echo "$line" fi done < data.file echo # end script In the above script, print everything, but the last line. On the last line set each field equal to the command line arguments $1, $2, etc. The above script works as long as the last line doesn't have over 9 fields. If it does have over 9 fields, the solution is a little more drawn out.

here's one that is more readable: in python though >>> o = open("output.txt","a") >>> yourfile = os.path.join("/home","file.txt") >>> for lines in open(yourfile): .......# get all words except the last word .......line = lines.split()[:-1] .......o.write(' '.join(line) + "\n") ... >>> o.close() >>>