xargs when the filename contains a newline

xargs when the filename contains a newline

Answer:

It is always handy to combine the power of find and xargs for a lot of tasks, such as

# find /tmp -type f | xargs rm -rf

However, the command will failed if the a file contains a newline character. To solve this, you can do like below.

# find /tmp -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

Now the file list returned by the find command is terminated by a null character, so it will not mixed with the newline character if they are part of the filename. Also, the xargs -0 option will treat the null character as the delimiter (rather than newline).

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