Why is this a problem? Except in terms of performance, it's completely invisible to the user as xargs will run the command multiple times to ensure all the arg

Why is this a problem? Except in terms of performance, it's completely invisible to the user as xargs will run the command multiple times to ensure all the arguments are processed. In the most extreme/unrealistic case, if xargs could only support invoking the command with a single arguement, then the performance would regress to that of using -exec. Otherwise it's much faster.