I need help counting the fields and field separators using Nawk.
I have a file that has multiple lines on it and I need to read the file 1 at a time and then count the fields and field separators and then store those numbers in variables. I then need to delete the first 5 fields and the blank spaces.
if its a very large file as OP mentioned, running each line through a while loop and echoing part of each through sed might not be that efficient. it might be better to eliminate the while loop and let sed iterate the file instead since sed is internally "looping" over files anyway.
Also, awk is specifically designed to process structured data so it understands fields. using awk might be more "appropriate" in OP's case.