Question

Is there a way to get awk to return the number of fields that meet a field-separator criteria? Say, for instance, the file contains:

a b c d

So, awk -F=' ' | <something> should return 4.

Answer 1

The NF variable is set to the total number of fields in the input record. So:

echo "a b c d" | awk --field-separator=" " "{ print NF }"

will display

4

Note, however, that:

echo -e "a b c d\na b" | awk --field-separator=" " "{ print NF }"

will display:

4
2

Hope this helps, and happy awking