note jaredor <p>++ for the END block idea. A further tweak would be to not process data in the main loop, but only the END block. Unfortunately I could not think of a slick way to make $_ available to END from the last loop iteration, so I had to cheat a little to golf your solution. Apparently the autosplit array does remain resident:</p> <code>perl -nae 'END { print "$F[-1]\n"; }' scan.log</code> <p>Good examples like yours are weaning me from sed ;-)</p> 1018813 1018828