Make xargs handle filenames that contain spaces

Question

ls  mp3   xargs mplayer    Playing Lemon    File not found   Lemon    Playing Tree mp3    File not found   Tree mp3     Exiting     End of file      My command fails because the file  Lemon Tree mp3  contains spaces and so xargs thinks it s two files  Can I make find   xargs work with filenames like this

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ls   grep mp3   sed -n  7p    xargs -i mplayer     Note that in the command above  xargs will call mplayer anew for each file  This may be undesirable for mplayer  but may be okay for other targets

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xargs on MacOS doesn t have -d option  so this solution uses -0 instead   Get ls to output one file per line  then translate newlines into nulls and tell xargs to use nulls as the delimiter   ls -1  mp3   tr   n    0    xargs -0 mplayer

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Alternative solutions can be helpful     You can also add a null character to the end of your lines using Perl  then use the -0 option in xargs  Unlike the xargs -d   n   in approved answer  - this works everywhere  including OS nbsp X   For example  to recursively list  execute  move  etc   MPEG3 files which may contain spaces or other funny characters - I d use   find     grep   mp3   perl -ne  chop  print     0     xargs -0  ls    Note  For filtering  I prefer the easier-to-remember    grep   syntax to  find s  --name arguments

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Given the specific title of this post  here s my suggestion   ls   grep       tr       lt     sed  s  lt      g    The idea is to convert blanks to any unique character  like   lt    and then change that into       a backslash followed by a blank   You can then pipe that into any command you like  such as   ls   grep       tr       lt     sed  s  lt      g    xargs -L1 GetFileInfo   The key here lies in the  tr  and  sed  commands  and you can use any character besides   lt    such as     or even a tab-character

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Try   find   -name    mp3 -print0   xargs -0 mplayer   instead of   ls   grep mp3

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Dick Guertin s answer  1  suggested that one could escape the spaces in a filename is a valuable alternative to other solutions suggested here  such as using a null character as a separator rather than whitespace    But it could be simpler - you don t really need a unique character   You can just have sed add the escaped spaces directly   ls   grep       sed  s       g    xargs       Furthermore  the grep is only necessary if you only want files with spaces in the names   More generically  e g   when processing a batch of files some of which have spaces  some not   just skip the grep   ls   sed  s       g    xargs       Then  of course  the filename may have other whitespace than blanks  e g   a tab    ls   sed -r  s    blank       1 g    xargs       That assumes you have a sed that supports -r  extended regex  such as GNU sed or recent versions of bsd sed  e g   FreeBSD which originally spelled the option  -E  before FreeBSD 8 and supports both -r  amp  -E for compatibility through FreeBSD 11 at least    Otherwise you can use a basic regex character class bracket expression and manually enter the space and tab characters in the    delimiters     1  This is perhaps more appropriate as a comment or an edit to that answer  but at the moment I do not have enough reputation to comment and can only suggest edits   Since the latter forms above  without the grep  alters the behavior of Dick Guertin s original answer  a direct edit is perhaps not appropriate anyway

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I know that I m not answering the xargs question directly but it s worth mentioning find s -exec option   Given the following file system    root localhost bokeh   tree --charset assci bands bands  -- Dream  Theater  -- King s  X  -- Megadeth  -- Rush  0 directories  4 files   The find command can be made to handle the space in Dream Theater and King s X   So  to find the drummers of each band using grep    root localhost   find bands  -type f -exec grep Drums      bands Dream Theater Drums Mike Mangini bands Rush Drums  Neil Peart bands King s X Drums Jerry Gaskill bands Megadeth Drums Dirk Verbeuren   In the -exec option    stands for the filename including path   Note that you don t have to escape it or put it in quotes   The difference between -exec s terminators    and     is that   groups as many file names that it can onto one command line   Whereas    will execute the command for each file name   So  find bands  -type f -exec grep Drums      will result in   grep Drums  bands Dream Theater   bands Rush   bands King s X   bands Megadeth    and find bands  -type f -exec grep Drums       will result in   grep Drums  bands Dream Theater  grep Drums  bands Rush  grep Drums  bands King s X  grep Drums  bands Megadeth    In the case of grep this has the side effect of either printing the filename or not    root localhost bokeh   find bands  -type f -exec grep Drums       Drums Mike Mangini Drums  Neil Peart Drums Jerry Gaskill Drums Dirk Verbeuren   root localhost bokeh   find bands  -type f -exec grep Drums      bands Dream Theater Drums Mike Mangini bands Rush Drums  Neil Peart bands King s X Drums Jerry Gaskill bands Megadeth Drums Dirk Verbeuren   Of course  grep s options -h and -H will control whether or not the filename is printed regardless of how grep is called     xargs  xargs can also control how man files are on the command line   xargs by default groups all the arguments onto one line   In order to do the same thing that -exec    does use xargs -l   Note that the -t option tells xargs to print the command before executing it    root localhost bokeh   find   bands -type f    xargs -d   n  -l -t grep Drums grep Drums   bands Dream Theater  Drums Mike Mangini grep Drums   bands Rush  Drums  Neil Peart grep Drums   bands King s X  Drums Jerry Gaskill grep Drums   bands Megadeth  Drums Dirk Verbeuren   See that the -l option tells xargs to execute grep for every filename   Versus the default  i e  no -l option     root localhost bokeh   find   bands -type f    xargs -d   n   -t grep Drums grep Drums   bands Dream Theater   bands Rush   bands King s X   bands Megadeth    bands Dream Theater Drums Mike Mangini   bands Rush Drums  Neil Peart   bands King s X Drums Jerry Gaskill   bands Megadeth Drums Dirk Verbeuren   xargs has better control on how many files can be on the command line   Give the -l option the max number of files per command    root localhost bokeh   find   bands -type f    xargs -d   n   -l2 -t grep Drums grep Drums   bands Dream Theater   bands Rush    bands Dream Theater Drums Mike Mangini   bands Rush Drums  Neil Peart grep Drums   bands King s X   bands Megadeth    bands King s X Drums Jerry Gaskill   bands Megadeth Drums Dirk Verbeuren  root localhost bokeh      See that grep was executed with two filenames because of -l2

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The xargs utility reads space  tab  newline and end-of-file delimited strings from the standard input and executes utility with the strings as arguments   You want to avoid using space as a delimiter  This can be done by changing the delimiter for xargs  According to the manual     -0      Change xargs to expect NUL     0    characters as separators           instead of spaces and newlines   This is expected to be used in          concert with the -print0 function in find 1      Such as    find   -name    mp3  -print0   xargs -0 mplayer   To answer the question about playing the seventh mp3  it is simpler to run   mplayer    ls   mp3   sed -n 7p

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find   -name  Lemon  mp3  -print0   xargs -  0 -i mplayer         This helped in my case to delete different files with spaces  It should work too with mplayer  The necessary trick is the quotes   Tested on Linux Xubuntu 14 04

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The xargs command takes white space characters  tabs  spaces  new lines  as delimiters  You can narrow it down only for the new line characters    n   with -d option like this  ls   mp3   xargs -d   n  mplayer  It works only with GNU xargs  For BSD systems  use the -0 option like this  ls   mp3   xargs -0 mplayer  This method is simpler and works with the GNU xargs as well  For MacOS  ls   mp3   tr   n   0   xargs -0 mplayer

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On macOS 10 12 x  Sierra   if you have spaces in file names or subdirectories  you can use the following   find   -name    swift  -exec echo            xargs wc -l

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It depends on  a  how attached you are to the number 7 as opposed to  say  Lemons  and  b  whether any of your file names contain newlines  and whether you re willing to rename them if they do    There are many ways to deal with it  but some of them are   mplayer Lemon  mp3  find   -name  Lemon  mp3  -exec mplayer         i 0 for mp3 in   mp3 do     i    i 1          i   7    amp  amp  mplayer   mp3  done  for mp3 in   mp3 do     case   mp3  in      Lemon   mplayer   mp3        esac done  i 0 find   -name   mp3   while read mp3 do     i    i 1          i   7    amp  amp  mplayer   mp3  done   The read loop doesn t work if file names contain newlines  the others work correctly even with newlines in the names  let alone spaces    For my money  if you have file names containing a newline  you should rename the file without the newline   Using the double quotes around the file name is key to the loops working correctly   If you have GNU find and GNU xargs  or FreeBSD   BSD    or Mac OS X   you can also use the -print0 and -0 options  as in   find   -name  Lemon  mp3  -print0   xargs -0 mplayer   This works regardless of the contents of the name  the only two characters that cannot appear in a file name are slash and NUL  and the slash causes no problems in a file path  so using NUL as the name delimiter covers everything    However  if you need to filter out the first 6 entries  you need a program that handles  lines  ended by NUL instead of newline   and I m not sure there are any   The first is by far the simplest for the specific case on hand  however  it may not generalize to cover your other scenarios that you ve not yet listed

[shell] Make xargs handle filenames that contain spaces

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