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.
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