D'OH!
Right you are! Sorry, I'm afraid I hadn't finished my first cup of coffee yet (late night).
Operating a keyboard without sufficient coffee, should be considered as bad as
drinking, and driving -- that's one citation for me! :/
To your original point; My previous attempts with xargs(1) produced inconsistent results -- hence, my previous reply.
But what about the "for loop", you ask? Probably overkill; I used it, it worked && bad habits die hard. ;)
I should use this as an opportunity to conjure up a perl script, to accomplish these same tasks. :)
use perl::always;
my $perl_version( 5.12.4 );
print $perl_version;