How to find the last match of a string in a bunch of files

Question

I have a bunch of files, I'd like to find the last match of a string in each of them.

grep text *.file gives me all the matches not the last ones.

ls *.file | xargs grep text | tail -n 1 gives me the last line of the last file that matches.

So what I think I want is a way to say:

ls *.file | (xargs grep text | tail -n 1)

But I'm not sure how to do this, or if it's possible.

Solution

Use tail -n 1 in a for loop. For example:

for name in *.file; do
    grep -H text "$name" | tail -n 1
done

(The -H option will make grep always print the file name, even if only one file was given.)

Comments

[jvriesem]

+1 for the -H option.