De man xargs
:
--delimiter=delim -d delim Input items are terminated by the specified character. Quotes and backslash are not special; every character in the input is taken literally. Disables the end-of-file string, which is treated like any other argument. This can be used when the input consists of simply newline-separated items, although it is almost always better to design your program to use --null where this is possible. The specified delimiter may be a single character, a C-style character escape such as \n, or an octal or hexadecimal escape code. Octal and hexadecimal escape codes are understood as for the printf command. Multibyte characters are not supported.
Como exemplo:
$ echo '"""' | xargs
\xargs: unmatched double quote; by default quotes are special to xargs unless you use the -0 option
$ echo '"""' | xargs -d '\n'
"""
$ echo '"""' | xargs -d ' '
"""
Claro, usar qualquer um pode quebrar as coisas, mas talvez não tanto quanto -0
.