On 7 Oct 2012, Darrell Anderson said:
If xargs on all systems is a safe presumption
To a first approximation, nothing will work without xargs: it's in POSIX and GNU coreutils. If distributors are leaving out core parts of a working Unix system I don't think Trinity can be expected to run on them.
(Any non-embedded distributor will be utterly certain to include it. Heck, Android has a copy.)