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From: TJ Luoma <luomat@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2014 17:06:06 -0400
Message-ID: <CADjGqHuALx7Ue3Ei3s7XvT_pHWxECo2rt=BNegPO5Fwcuge2LQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: how do I get the last argument from a list of arguments?
To: Zsh-Users List <zsh-users@zsh.org>
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I=E2=80=99m trying to learn better ways of dealing with arguments given to =
a
function, because I am sure that I am not doing it the most efficient
way.

For example, if I want to process a series of args, I usually use a
loop like this:

for FOO in "$@"
do
     case "$FOO" in
          -t|--to)
               shift
               TO=3D"$1"
               shift
          ;;

          -v|--verbose)
               VERBOSE=3D'yes'
          shift
          ;;

          -*|--*)
               echo " $NAME [warning]: Don't know what to do with arg: $1"
               shift
          ;;

     esac

done # for args

That has worked OK for what I've needed to do, but now I'm trying to
create two functions which I will use in place of 'cp' and 'mv' and I
need to be able to find the _last_ argument (the destination) before I
process all the rest of the args.

The only way that I can think of to get the last argument is to do
something like this

     LAST=3D`echo "$@" | awk '{print $NF}'`

but that made me wonder if there wasn=E2=80=99t a better way.

Note that this does not need to be 'portable' at all -- I will happily
use any zsh-specific features which may exist, as long as it works in
5.0.2 (which is what comes with OS X).

Thanks!

TjL