I assume you mean “find | xargs”, rather than “find | grep”; the latter would grep against the paths that find matches, rather than their contents. Anyway, the

I assume you mean “find | xargs”, rather than “find | grep”; the latter would grep against the paths that find matches, rather than their contents. Anyway, the reason “find | xargs” is considered an antipattern is because xargs splits its input on newlines and this would break on any paths that contained a newline. Arguably, you can get around this by using find’s -print0 and xargs’s -0 arguments, respectively, as paths cannot contain null bytes, but you might as well have used -exec at this point!