I am starting with a file containing a list of hundreds of files (full paths) in a random order. I would like to list the details of the ten latest files in that list. This
Instead of "one or more blank characters", you can force bash to use another field separator:
OIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
ls -las -t $(cat list-of-files.txt) | head -10
IFS=$OIFS
However, I don't think this code would be more efficient than doing a loop; in addition, that won't work if the number of files in list-of-files.txt exceeds the max number of arguments.