How to count words in a line

If you can use awk, NF is the number of fields in the current line (by default, a field is a word delimited by any amount of whitespace).

Use

awk '{ print NF, $0 }' inputfile

With your sample input, this will print

4 drinks water cola fanta
3 fruit banana orange

In Bash and wc:

IFS=$'\n'
while read line; do
    wc -w <<< "$line"
done < file.txt

wc counts lines, words, bytes in files. With a shell loop you can make it count words in a line.

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