I came across scripts where | xargs is executed without any arguments. I started removing such occurrences because scripts just work without them but wanted to verify that I'm not missing something. Perhaps xargs defaults to sanitising some characters, etc.
... | cut -d: -f2- | xargs
Is there any point of having the | xargs above? Thanks in advance.
Without any arguments xargs will combine all lines in the output into a single line, and will remove extra spaces:
$ echo $'a b\nb'
a b
b
$ echo $'a b\nb' | xargs
a b b
Note that this will only work if the input of xargs is smaller than the maximum size of the command buffer. See example below:
$ seq 100 | xargs | wc -l
1
$ seq 1000000 | xargs | wc -l
53