note
blokhead
You can even do it avoiding the temporary list generated by <tt>split</tt>. Instead, you can use <tt>rindex</tt> to go directly to the appropriate part of the string:
<c>
my $rec = " 2425 S 25 \" 6 47! 86 18 21! 87 23 23! - -! - -! 96";
my $last = substr $rec, 1 + rindex($rec, " ");
print $last, $/;
</c>
I'm only posting this for the sake of completeness. This only works because your record separator is whitespace. <tt>rindex</tt> won't generalize as well as <tt>split</tt> (more complicated separators, picking out records other than the last, ignoring trailing empty records).
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