Other way 'round: xargs was the newline inserter, splitting a WS-separated list into multiple lines. That's still the first time I'd ever seen xargs used like that! -Adam On Jan 18, 2014 12:54 AM, Trevor Cordes <trevor@tecnopolis.ca> wrote:

As per Tuesday's meeting RTFM:

ibm.com gave me the first hint: If no command template appears on the command line, xargs uses echo by default.

Which then let me find it in Linux's man page: ... and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) ...

So they were basically using xargs as a newline-eater to combine all the lines of the iteration into one. _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable