unix - count of columns in file

Question

Given a file with data like this (i.e. stores.dat file)

sid|storeNo|latitude|longitude
2|1|-28.03720000|153.42921670
9|2|-33.85090000|151.03274200


        

Answer 1

This is a workaround (for me: I don't use awk very often):

Display the first row of the file containing the data, replace all pipes with newlines and then count the lines:

$ head -1 stores.dat | tr '|' '\n' | wc -l

Answer 2

You could try

cat FILE | awk '{print NF}'

Answer 3

If you have python installed you could try:

python -c 'import sys;f=open(sys.argv[1]);print len(f.readline().split("|"))' \
    stores.dat

Answer 4

Unless you're using spaces in there, you should be able to use | wc -w on the first line.

wc is "Word Count", which simply counts the words in the input file. If you send only one line, it'll tell you the amount of columns.

Answer 5

This is usually what I use for counting the number of fields:

head -n 1 file.name | awk -F'|' '{print NF; exit}'

Answer 6

select any row in the file (in the example below, it's the 2nd row) and count the number of columns, where the delimiter is a space:

sed -n 2p text_file.dat | tr ' ' '\n' | wc -l