Linux – Newline-separated xargs

I've been experimenting with the following to emulate the feature from zsh in Bash:

$ unset PROMPT_SP; for ((i = 1; i <= $COLUMNS + 52; i++ )); do PROMPT_SP+=' '; done
$ PS1='\[\e[7m%\e[m\]${PROMPT_SP: -$COLUMNS+1}\015$ '

It issues a reverse video percent sign, followed by a bunch of spaces to make it wrap to the next line, then a carriage return, followed by a dollar sign and a space. You can add prompt escapes after the "\015" to customize your prompt.

Using this depends on how your terminal handles right margin line wrapping (automatic margins). The length of PROMPT_SP is arbitrary, but should be at least 80 or whatever your usual terminal width is. You may need to hard-code that value if $COLUMNS isn't set yet by the time the for loop is run in ~/.bashrc. You may want shopt -s checkwinsize if it's not already set.

If you're using a shell that supports backticks- or $()-style command substitution (most shells do), then in your case, you can avoid using xargs entirely, like this:

ssh $(host -t PTR $(host -t A DomainIWant.com | awk '{print $4}') | awk '{print $5}')

(I added the -t flags to the host commands, to ensure they only emit 1 line of output.)