Question

I’m having trouble searching for the last occurrence of a string in a file using awk. I’m passing a string to the script example “Ping has failed on hostname”. I keep getting awk: ^ unterminated string.
#!/bin/sh

LOG=/opt/netcool/omnibus/log/mttrapd.log
TMP_FILE=sitescope.$$
args="$*"

#ruby sitescope.rb

echo "looking for $1 "

tail -1000  $LOG > $TMP_FILE

echo "WORD = $args"

awk  '"/'$args'/" {f=$0} END{print f}' $TMP_FILE > data.out

rm -f $TMP_FILE

Answer 1

The point of the single-quotes around the awk string is to keep everything in the first argument (and prevent shell substitution). You can be a bit more flexable with how you put that argument together as

awk  "/$args/"' {f=$0} END{print f}' $TMP_FILE > data.out