Red Hat

I am trying to count the number of columns in a delimited flat file. The record is tab delimited. When I use the command wc -w, I am getting unexpected results when the record contains a NULL value. I believe it is because there is a "word" missing.

The below example will return 4 words although I was expecting 5 (based on tab delimiters. So actually what I want to do is add the tabs and add 1 to determine the number of words (including NULLs).

0000000 141 142 011 061 062 011 172 171 011 011 071 070 012
a b \t 1 2 \t z y \t \t 9 8 \n

Thanks.

Code:

 
> cat t1.txt
a b      1 2     z y             9 8 
c b      1 2     z y             9 8 
> awk -F "\t" '{x=NF+x} END {print x}' t1.txt
10

This prints a count of records by line... Like:
Line1=4
Line2=4
Line3=5
...

Code:

> cat t1.txt
a b      1 2     z y             9 8 
c b      1 2     z y             9 8 
> nawk -F"\t" '{ print "Line"NR"="NF } ' t1.txt