Matlab command to access the last line of each file?

Question

I have 20 text files, and I want to use a matlab loop to get the last line of each file without taking into consideration the other lines. is there any matlab command to solve this problem?

Answer 1

One thing you can try is to open the text file as a binary file, seek to the end of the file, and read single characters (i.e. bytes) backwards from the end of the file. This code will read characters from the end of the file until it hits a newline character (ignoring a newline if it finds it at the very end of the file):

fid = fopen('data.txt','r');     %# Open the file as a binary
lastLine = '';                   %# Initialize to empty
offset = 1;                      %# Offset from the end of file
fseek(fid,-offset,'eof');        %# Seek to the file end, minus the offset
newChar = fread(fid,1,'*char');  %# Read one character
while (~strcmp(newChar,char(10))) || (offset == 1)
  lastLine = [newChar lastLine];   %# Add the character to a string
  offset = offset+1;
  fseek(fid,-offset,'eof');        %# Seek to the file end, minus the offset
  newChar = fread(fid,1,'*char');  %# Read one character
end
fclose(fid);  %# Close the file

Answer 2

On Unix, simply use:

[status result] = system('tail -n 1 file.txt');
if isstrprop(result(end), 'cntrl'), result(end) = []; end

On Windows, you can get the tail executable from the GnuWin32 or UnxUtils projects.