Understanding the UNIX command xargs

Question

I\'m pretty much confused on this. Need some clarifications.

Example 1 :

pgrep string | xargs ps

Example 2 :

Answer 1

#!/bin/sh
#script to echo out the arguments 1 at a time!
for a in $*
do
    echo $a
done

the command

$sh myscript 1 2 3 4 5

will yield

1
2
3
4
5

but

$sh myscript 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

will not work since the max number of parameters is exceeded (im not actually sure what the max is, but lets say its 10 for this example!)

To get around this we could use

#!/bin/sh
#script to echo out the arguments 1 at a time!
for a in $*
do
    echo $a | xargs echo
done

we could then run it like this

 $sh myscript "1 2 3 4 5" "6 7 8 9 10 11"

and get the correct result since there are just 2 parameters