Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Using xargs with find

The xargs and find command can be combined to perform tasks. However, take care to combine them carefully. Consider this example:

$ find . -type f -name "*.txt"  -print | xargs rm -f 

This is dangerous. It may cause removal of unexpected files. We cannot predict the delimiting character (whether it is '\n' or ' ') for the output of the find command. If any filenames contain a space character (' ') xargs may misinterpret it as a delimiter. For example, bashrc text.txt would be misinterpreted by xargs as bashrc and text.txt. The previous command would not delete bashrc text.txt, but would delete bashrc.

Use the -print0 option of find to produce an output delimited by the null character ('\0'); you use find output as ...