On 16/03/18 Robert P. J. Day said: > again, as i mentioned, i do understand the value of xargs because of > the plethora of useful "tricks" like the above, but those features > aside, the basic question is still, does xargs still have value > *solely* for its ability to run commands in bite-size pieces? Yes. All commands have limited input buffers for arguments thank to the shell, and if they try to scale they can run into memory limitations. I've used it to delete millions of small files on a system before. Mike