IMO, if you deal exclusively in shell on UNIX-alikes, you'll likely only need -print0 once in blue moon because people just don't tend to create filenames with

IMO, if you deal exclusively in shell on UNIX-alikes, you'll likely only need -print0 once in blue moon because people just don't tend to create filenames with spaces or other amusements in them. The instant you add Windows to the mix, suddenly it's the best feature ever and becomes the default for any 'find -print0 | xargs -0 ...' pipeline. I also think that binary sized string should be the default for shells and command pipelines; plain text was great in the 60s, but it's now the 21st century and I use too many shell flavours on too many systems to remember their arcane quoting rules, locale rules, unicode bugs, etc. Regardless, it's a shame that there's not a standard separation of UI from functionality in all these utilities - more than once I've wanted to just be able to dynamically link libsort.so from another program because writing files and exec'ing ... urgh.