How to count a pattern inside a phrase?

For example:

/A/B/C/D/

I know that this command:

awk -FS'/' '{print $1}'

Prints the first pattern: A

But, how can I count the number of ‘/’ inside that phrase? The output will be: 5

>Solution :

You might inform GNU AWK that / is field using FPAT built-in variable and then check number of fields, let file.txt content be

/A/B/C/D/

then

awk 'BEGIN{FPAT="/"}{print NF}' file.txt

gives output

5

(tested in GNU Awk 5.1.0)