title: Number of fields returned by awk
body: <p>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  </p>
  
  <pre><code>a b c d
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>so, <code>awk --field-separator=" " | &lt;something&gt;</code> should return 4  </p>