"Catching" rows affected

I have a function that shows a set numbers of records from a result at a
time. Under the rows I indicate how many pages there are. To achive this the
same query is run twice. Once to get the content and once with COUNT to get
the number of records.

This seems very wasteful. Is there a way to "catch" the number of rows
affected? In psql the number is indicated below the result for no apparent
extra cost.

Using 7.2 on Debian with Perl.

Best Regards

Torbjörn "Toby" Andersson
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