awk replacing text but not for the last line.

Question

i tried the awk liner below(on windows command-prompt):not working properly

gawk -v var="hot" "{ if(!NR){gsub(/cool/,var,$0) ;print} else{print}}" awk_test

input file is below

 this is a cool jack
 this nota cool kack
 this obviously a cool jack 

a unix solution is also feasible

Answer 1

You could try something like:

sed '$d' yourfile | sed 's/cool/hot/g' > newfile
tail -1 yourfile >> newfile

this should do the substitution on everything but the last line of the file first, and then add the last line of the original file.

Answer 2

awk -vvar="hot" '{gsub("cool",hot,t);print t}{t=$0}END{print}' file

Answer 3

You could also pass the number of lines as a parameter:

gawk -v var=hot -v lines=$(wc -l < test.txt) '
    NR != lines {gsub(/cool/, var)} 
    {print}
' test.txt