Efficient way to count the amount lines obeying some condition

Question

I'm try counting the number of lines in a file which 4th field is greater than first filed by using awk command I came up with this command:

awk '$4>$1 {print}' sampleFile | wc -l

Is there any better way to find the number rather than using wc -l

Answer 1

One way using GNU awk:

awk '$4 > $1 { count++ } END { print count }' file.txt