Counting columns in a tab delimited file

It sounds so simple, however, when you sit down to write this, specially as a single line expression, it can take a while.

In my experiments I found it rather easy to count it with other delimiters as compared to TAB character.

Here is the command for counting columns

cat <FILENAME>| awk -F'\t' '{print NF}'

 cat can be slow at times, especially with larger files, therefore an alternative without that...

awk -F'\t' '{print NF}' <FILENAME>