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 10 hours ago | parent [-]

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 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>* 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`
	▲	laughing_man 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.