Regular Expression - match 'b' that follows 'a' and is at the end of a string

Hi,

I'm struggling with a regex that would match a 'b' that follows an 'a' and is at the end of a string of non-white characters. For example:

Line 1: aba   abab   b   abb   aab   bab   baa

I can find the right strings but I'm lacking knowledge of how to "discard" the bits that precede bs.

Any idea?

Try this:

awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if($i ~ "ab$"){print $i}}}'

Regards

Thank you for your reply, not quite what I was looking for, though. I was looking for something that was not specifically for awk, like:

\<[^\t\n\f\r ]*ab\>

But I wanted to find just parts of strings (last 'b's) which was wrong in the first place as regular expressions are meant to find *whole* strings. D'oh! Oh man, where did I get that idea from... (o: