Re: Perl realted question..

[Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org>]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 09:45:15PM -0800, Sam wrote:
> if i read you correctly, you can read the file into an array and use pop,
> which will return the last element read.Or you could use @array[-1]

That's rather wasteful of memory, which becomes a concern with larger
files.  If the objective is indeed to get the last line in the file,
then you only need a scalar to stick each line into and its final stored
value will be the last line:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $last;

while (<>) {
  $last = $_;
  chomp $last;
}
print $last, "\n";

Of course, if this is being done as a standalone operation, then just
using `tail -1 filename` on the command line would definitely be easier
and probably more efficient.