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Comment by jsrcout | Hacker News Reader

For tools that don't support -0, you can add the NULs yourself without much fuss. It's a one-liner in awk/perl/sed. Very handy.

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If you do not have -0 options in your xargs/find, I wonder if you will have those extensions in your awk/sed. Perl is a different story.

I think the parent was referring to using awk/sed to do the equivalent of:

    find ... | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 ...

I.e., a blind replacement without the tool having any particular semantic understanding of what it's translating.

That still requires your xargs to have -0 support, though, and I'd be surprised to have that without the corresponding option on find. But I've done this before when feeding xargs from something other than find.

It is also built on the assumption that filenames never contain newlines, which is wrong in general.

It's baffling to me that POSIX allows non-printable characters in file names, but here we are. Surely they had a reason for this decision.

That’s changing, maybe eventually even on real systems: https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu#the-nuclear-option

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