An efficient way to count the number of rows that obey a certain condition

Question

I am trying to count the number of lines in a file, which is the 4th field greater than the first filed using the awk command. I came up with this command:

awk '$4>$1 {print}' sampleFile | wc -l 

Is there a better way to find a number and not use wc -l

Answer 1

One way: GNU awk :

 awk '$4 > $1 { count++ } END { print count }' file.txt