citando a página do manual:
xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is
/bin/echo
) one or more times with any initial-arguments followed by items read from standard input. Blank lines on the standard input are ignored.Because Unix filenames can contain blanks and newlines, this default behaviour is often problematic; filenames containing blanks and/or newlines are incorrectly processed by
xargs
. In these situations it is better to use the-0
option, which prevents such problems. When using this option you will need to ensure that the program which produces the input forxargs
also uses a null character as a separator. If that program is GNUfind
for example, the-print0
option does this for you.