Do recent versions of xargs cope with exit status?

[Arthur David Olson]

Familiar scene:  you want to grep for something in a large number of files.
You generate the list of file names, then
	grep whatever `cat listofnames`
only to get an
	arg list too long
message.  "Sure wish I could tell grep to read the names of the files to handle
from a file" you think at first.  Then you recall a couple of recent postings
about how such options aren't needed, since you can use xargs to get the job
done, a la
	cat listofnames | xargs grep whatever /dev/null
(This does the wrong thing if there's only one filename; since we're assuming
a large number of files. . .)  Sure enough, everything works fine.

Now suppose, though, that the command is
	grep -s whatever `cat listofnames`
If so, doing a
	cat listofnames | xargs grep -s whatever /dev/null
doesn't get the job done right. . .at least not with the System V Release 2
version on xargs that lurks on the systems around here.

And so the question:  do more recent versions of xargs allow better control
of the exit status returned by xargs?
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