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?

Answer 1

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 MacOS:

ls *.mp3 | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 mplayer 

The more simplistic and practically useful approach (when don't need to process the filenames further):

mplayer *.mp3 

Answer 2

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)"