Remove a line if it contains more than 3 spaces

I have a text file in the form

sadsadsad sadsadsadd sadasdsadad

some of the lines in there contain an addition space in the middle of the s开发者_运维知识库econd column such as

sadsadsad sads adsadd sadasdsadad

Can I use awk to look at the file and delete the line if there's more than 2 spaces on a particular line?

You don't need awk for that, a simple sed will do:

sed -e '/ .* .* /d'

If you want awk specifically, you can do something like this:

!/ .* .* / {
    print;
}

You can also customize the regexp to be more precise, maybe by using in both cases / [^ ]+ [^ ]+ /. Or even, as jkerian proposes in another answer, just use NF.

There's probably a regex you can create to do this with a regex match with sed or awk... but this works

awk '{if ($4 == "") print}' input_file

Another alternative is to use the NF variable

awk '{if (NF < 4) print}' input_file