3 ms·

xargs supports null termination. While it's true not every command supports multiple targets, presumably you know if you're using one of those commands.

• eqvinox 3mo ago
  xargs sure does support null termination. Does whatever I'm piping into it though? It's "find" in maybe 30% of cases for me, no more, and null termination is not exactly common in other tools.
  • laughing_man 3mo ago
    I'm not sure what you're trying to say. If you need null termination you're going to be a lot better off adding it at the source (say, with sed) than trying to make a while loop work in a shell script. If you don't need null termination, then... don't use it.
    • eqvinox 3mo ago
      I am saying I have a whole bunch of other (not find) sources of items (not even filenames necessarily) that I need to loop over, none of which do null termination on output. It's an item per line, with spaces unescaped. I would either need "| tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0" or "| xargs -d '\n'". Considering the body of a while loop is more flexible too, I spend the brain capacity on remembering the details on that rather than xargs. I'm well aware xargs is sometimes called for, but it's rare and when it happens I go look up the man page.