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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-0option, which prevents such problems. When using this option you will need to ensure that the program which produces the input forxargsalso uses a null character as a separator. If that program is GNUfindfor example, the-print0option does this for you.