[laughing_man]

Depending on the actual command, this can be far slower and less efficient than xargs. You're creating a separate process for each invocation of bar when a lot of commands will take many targets for a single invocation.

Try this with find and grep vs xargs. There's a big difference.

[eqvinox]

3 reasons against that:

* in a lot of cases the performance just doesn't matter

* xargs gets you the spaces in filenames landmine

* some commands don't even support multiple target filename arguments

For scripts in long term use, yeah, sure, figure out xargs maybe. Any other situation with a "| while read" solution, especially on an interactive session, is an oddball and simplicity wins.

[aa-jv]

>* xargs gets you the spaces in filenames landmine

Ignorance of xargs gets you the landmine.

Understanding of xargs, helps you complete the mission without blowing off limbs.

    $ find . -name "Some Files With Spaces*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} echo "Processing: {}"  # landmine avoided

[eqvinox]

cf. sibling, find is not the only thing to pipe from.

[laughing_man]

xargs supports null termination.

While it's true not every command supports multiple targets, presumably you know if you're using one of those commands.

[eqvinox]

xargs sure does support null termination.

Does whatever I'm piping into it though? It's "find" in maybe 30% of cases for me, no more, and null termination is not exactly common in other tools.

[laughing_man]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. If you need null termination you're going to be a lot better off adding it at the source (say, with sed) than trying to make a while loop work in a shell script. If you don't need null termination, then... don't use it.

[eqvinox]

I am saying I have a whole bunch of other (not find) sources of items (not even filenames necessarily) that I need to loop over, none of which do null termination on output. It's an item per line, with spaces unescaped. I would either need "| tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0" or "| xargs -d '\n'".

Considering the body of a while loop is more flexible too, I spend the brain capacity on remembering the details on that rather than xargs.

I'm well aware xargs is sometimes called for, but it's rare and when it happens I go look up the man page.