Often you may want to use Bash to count the number of columns in a particular file.
You can use the following methods to do so:
Method 1: Count Number of Columns in Text File
awk '{print NF}' teams.txt | sort -nu | tail -n 1
This particular example will return the total number of columns in the text file named teams.txt.
Note: We used tail -n 1 to return the highest column count for a given row. This is useful if not every row has the same number of columns.
Method 2: Count Number of Columns in CSV File
awk -F',' '{print NF}' player_data.csv | sort -nu | tail -n 1
This particular example will return the total number of columns in the CSV file named player_data.csv.
Note: We used -F’,’ to specify that a comma should be used as a delimiter when reading the file.
The following examples show how to use each method in practice.
Example 1: Count Number of Columns in Text File
Suppose we have a file named teams.txt that contains information about various basketball teams.
We can use the cat command to view the contents of the file:
We can use the following syntax to count the number of columns in this file:
awk '{print NF}' teams.txt | sort -nu | tail -n 1
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
This returns a value of 3, which tells us that there are 3 total columns in the text file.
Example 2: Count Number of Columns in CSV File
Suppose we have a file named player_data.csv that contains information about various basketball players.
We can use the cat command to view the contents of the file:
We can use the following syntax to count the number of columns in this file:
awk -F',' '{print NF}' player_data.csv | sort -nu | tail -n 1
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
This returns a value of 3, which tells us that there are 3 total columns in the CSV file.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Count Number of Unique Lines in File
Bash: How to Count Number of Characters in String
Bash: How to List All Files in Folder by Size
