Write a Shell script, which counts the number of words in a file, without taking into consideration the blank space, tab spaces and the newline characters without using wc

read file

l=`wc -l $file|cut -d " " -f 1`

echo $l

count=0

coch=0

for (( i=1; i<=l; i++))

do

        n=1

        line=`head -$i $file|tail -1`

        echo $line

        ch=`echo $line|cut -c $n`

        echo character is $ch

        while [ "$ch" != "" ]

        do

                if [ "$ch" = " " ]

                then

                count=`expr $count + 1`

                else

                coch=`expr $coch + 1`

                fi

                n=`expr $n + 1`

                ch=`echo $line|cut -c $n`

        done

done

echo no. of space $count

echo no. of characters $coch