Using file contents as command line arguments in BASH

the '-n' option for xargs specifies how many arguments to use per command :

$ xargs -n2 < arglist echo cp

cp src/file1 dst/file1
cp src/file2 dst/file2
cp src/file3 dst/file3

Using read (this does assume that any spaces in the filenames in arglist are escaped):

while read src dst; do cp "$src" "$dst"; done < argslist

If the arguments in the file are in the right order and filenames with spaces are quoted, then this will also work:

while read args; do cp $args; done < argslist

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