Is there a cleaner way of getting the last N characters of every line?

Question

To simplify the discussion, let N = 3.

My current approach to extracting the last three characters of every line in a file or stream is to use sed

Answer 1

Why emphasize brevity when it's a tiny command either way? Generality is much more important:

$ cat file
123456789
abcdefghijklmn

To print 3 characters starting from the 4th character:

$ awk '{print substr($0,4,3)}' file
456
def

To print 3 characters starting from the 4th-last character:

$ awk '{print substr($0,length($0)-3,3)}' file
678
klm

To print 3 characters from [around] the middle of each line:

$ awk '{print substr($0,(length($0)-3)/2,3)}' file
345
efg