Using awk to count number of records

Question

I want to count all the records in a table through awk but NR prints record nos of all records not the total count. I even tried:

NF==4,count++{print count}
         


        

Answer 1

Please show a sample of your file and what you want to do with it (show the desired output ) next time. Just guessing what you want,

awk 'NF==4{count++} END {print count}' file

the total number of records is indicated by NR.

awk 'END{print NR}' file1 file2

the total number of records currently is denoted by FNR.

awk 'END{print FNR}' file

Answer 2

I guess you mean total number of lines. In general, you should use wc -l <filename> for this. If you want to do this using awk, use

awk '{print NR}' | tail -1

If you only want to use awk, do

awk 'BEGIN{i=0}{i++;}END{print i}' <filename>