Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi, im having a problem with xargs, i want to cout word of each line in file, and i HAVE to use xargs, i tried:
cat file | xargs wc -w .....that uses all words in file like name of files and passed then to wc so it worte wc :somewordformfile is not i afile or directory
cat file | xargs -I{} wc -w {} do the same
cat file | xargs -I{} wc -w ...writes number if lines of file 0 ...for each line executes wc -w ...which returns zero,
I know why these dont work, but i dont know how to combine these two commands (yes i need to use wc and xargs only ...cat echo etc ofcourse) to get it. Sorry for my english, any thx for any help

you can do it by awk

Code:

awk '{print NF}' filename

if you want word count along with line

Code:

awk '{print NF" "$0}' filename

if you want to use wc -w only

Code:

while read line ; do
echo "$line"|wc -w
done < filename

yeah that works, i did it using for, but its homework and i have to use xargs to pass each line to wc, but i dont know how, because if i pass "string" to wc's stdin using | ..( echo "string with spaces" | wc -w it returns 3) ....ok but i need the same using xargs for each line

Sorry no homework question here
read the forum rules
closing the thread!!!