On Wed, 5 Jun 2013, Matthew Cengia wrote:
On 2013-06-04 23:45, Craig Sanders wrote:
it's still a LOT better (than xargs' default of white-space as a delimter) because even though \n is a valid character in a filename, [...]
My apologies, for some bizarre reason I assumed that xargs defaulted to newline-delimited rather than whitespace-delimited. In this case you're right; explicitly forcing newline delimiting using any method is less bad.
It is an awful pain though. I can count the number of times I've wanted xargs to split on spaces rather than newline, on my naked singularity (maybe it's a good thing in that it forces you to think before applying). Put it up there with historical stupidities like crontab(5) being minute hour ... -- Tim Connors