Comment by somat

I have used echo as a sort of poor mans equivalent for a safe check of a pipeline, removing the echo when I felt the rest of the pipeline was working correctly.

  shell stuff | xargs -n 1 -I % echo real command and % args

I have also been known to write scripts where instead of executing the critical parts it prints them. Then a dry run is

  script

and the real run is

  script | sh