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)  

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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 & -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.

Answer 3

Try

find . -name \*.mp3 -print0 | xargs -0 mplayer

instead of

ls | grep mp3 

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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.)