18 Jan
2014
18 Jan
'14
10:58 p.m.
On 2014-01-18 Adam Thompson wrote:
Other way 'round: xargs was the newline inserter, splitting a WS-separated list into multiple lines.
From memory, it looked to me like xargs was a NL-eater, and only an EOL NL- appender.
#cat > z a b c # xargs <z a b c *** note how the input is NL-sep, but the output is space-sep, just I think as in Kevin's RTFM. And the while loop was one line (one xargs call) per iteration. Of course, this is just from memory!