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!