awk - Number of records

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,
Is it possible to find the total number of records processed by awk at begining.
NR gives the value at the end. Is there any variable available to find the value at the begining?

Thanks
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Suman

2 
wc -l filename | read linecnt dummy
awk -v linecnt=$linecnt '{ print linecnt  }' filename

This defines linecnt as a variable with the number of lines in the file.