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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T08:28:56+00:00

I’m trying to reformat the output of the last command e.g. last -adn 10

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I’m trying to reformat the output of the last command e.g. last -adn 10 | head -n -2 | awk -F' {2,}' '{ print "USER:",$1,"IP:",$5 }'. 

>> last -adn 10 | head -n -2
root     pts/0        Tue Jul 10 13:51   still logged in    10.102.11.34
reboot   system boot  Fri Jun 22 09:37         (18+04:19)   0.0.0.0

I would like my output to be something like:

>>last -adn 10 | head -n -2 | awk -F' {2,}' '{ print "USER:",$1,"IP:",$5 }'
USER: root IP: 10.102.11.34 TIME: Tue Jul 10 13:51

I’ve tried every method described here, and I can’t figure out why this is not working for me.
When executing that command, it simply stores the whole line in $1, and the others are blank.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    By default, gawk does not enable interval expressions. You can enable them with the --re-interval flag. Other versions of awk may or may not support them at all.

    If you can’t enable the flag, you can use a more explicit match. For example:

    $ echo 'foo  bar baz' |
    awk -F'[[:space:]][[:space:]][[:space:]]*' '{print $2}'
bar baz
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