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I always wonder why something like xargs is not a shell built-in. It's such a common pattern, but I dread formulating the correct incantation every time.

I was happy to read that the author comes to the same conclusion and proposes an `each` builtin (albeit only for the Oil shell)! Like that there is no need to learn another mini language as pointed out.

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If you're a zsh user it offers a version of something like xargs in zargs¹. As the documentation shows it can be really quite powerful in part because of zsh's excellent globbing facilities, and I think without that support it wouldn't be all that useful as a built-in.

I'd also perhaps argue that the reason we don't want xargs to be a built-in is precisely because of zargs and the point in your second paragraph. If it was built-in it would no doubt be obscenely different in each shell, and five decades later a standard that no one follows would eventually specify its behaviour ;)

¹ https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.ht... - search for "zargs", it has no anchor. Sorry.

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