And here we see an additional cost of the xargs approach: the $(stat ...) in the above will get expanded inside the ""s before it gets fed to xargs, and you wou

And here we see an additional cost of the xargs approach: the $(stat ...) in the above will get expanded inside the ""s before it gets fed to xargs, and you would have to debug that (and ultimately either use single quotes or use \$). Nevertheless, I find xargs useful enough that I bite this bullet and have gotten very familiar with bash's quoting rules and how to work with them.