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    Maybe edit your answer to use singles quotes instead for escaping. It will work with any character (except '). Also, it has a strange behavior with empty lines. Commented Aug 15, 2011 at 16:08
  • The question specifically uses " so I feel obliged to make the code work with it. It depends what shell you are using weather the character needs to be escaped but bash/tcsh will both need to escape " Commented Aug 15, 2011 at 16:10
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    Of course, but there is no problem with -F'"'. Commented Aug 15, 2011 at 16:12
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    +1 What a good idea to use FS.... This will resolve the blank-line showing -1, and, for example, the "$1" from the bash commandline. ... awk -F"$1" '{print NF==0?NF:NF-1}' filename Commented Aug 15, 2011 at 22:19
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    Also work with multiple chars as separator... useful ! Commented Sep 30, 2016 at 15:35