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Is there a way to get awk to return the number of fields that met a field-separator criteria? Say, for instance, my file contains
a b c d so, awk --field-separator=" " | <something> should return 4
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awk with NF (number of fields) variable. NF is a built-in variable of awk command which is used to count the total number of fields in each line of the input text.
The gsub() function returns the number of substitutions made. If the variable to search and alter ( target ) is omitted, then the entire input record ( $0 ) is used.
If you notice awk 'print $1' prints first word of each line. If you use $3, it will print 3rd word of each line.
NF is a predefined variable whose value is the number of fields in the current record. awk automatically updates the value of NF each time it reads a record. No matter how many fields there are, the last field in a record can be represented by $NF . So, $NF is the same as $7 , which is ' example.
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
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