– Eric Hu Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 5:23 3 @EricHu: I'm able to see you will be bewildered, but it does not do Everything you say it does, at the very least not on any Unix-based mostly process I'm sure of. The output of obtain is piped to the regular input of xargs. The xargs system reads its normal input, splitting the input at white Area (bla