Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Using grep with xargs with the zero-byte suffix

The xargs command provides a list of command-line arguments to another command. When filenames are used as command-line arguments, use a zero-byte terminator for the filenames instead of the default space terminator. Filenames can contain space characters, which will be misinterpreted as name separators, causing a filename to be broken into two filenames (for example, New file.txt might be interpreted as two filenames New and file.txt). Using the zero-byte suffix option solves this problem. We use xargs to accept stdin text from commands such as grep and find. These commands can generate output with a zero-byte suffix. The xargs command will expect 0 byte termination when the -0 flag is used. ...