Comment by yudlejoza

Of xargs, for, and while, I have limited myself to while. It's more typing everytime but saves me from having to remember so many quirks of each command.

    cat input.file | ... | while read -r unit; do <cmd> ${unit}; done | ...

between 'while read -r unit' and 'while IFS= read -r unit' I can probably handle 90% of the cases. (maybe I should always use IFS since I tend to forget the proper way to use it).