Because file names can contain quotes, backslashes, blank characters,
and even newlines, it is not safe to process them using xargs
in its default mode of operation. But since most files’ names do not
contain blanks, this problem occurs only infrequently. If you are
only searching through files that you know have safe names, then you
need not be concerned about it.
Error messages issued by find and locate quote unusual
characters in file names in order to prevent unwanted changes in the
terminal’s state.
In many applications, if xargs botches processing a file
because its name contains special characters, some data might be lost.
The importance of this problem depends on the importance of the data
and whether anyone notices the loss soon enough to correct it.
However, here is an extreme example of the problems that using
blank-delimited names can cause. If the following command is run
daily from cron, then any user can remove any file on the
system:
find / -name '#*' -atime +7 -print | xargs rm
For example, you could do something like this:
eg$ echo > '# vmunix'
and then cron would delete /vmunix, if it ran
xargs with / as its current directory.
To delete other files, for example /u/joeuser/.plan, you could do this:
eg$ mkdir '# ' eg$ cd '# ' eg$ mkdir u u/joeuser u/joeuser/.plan' ' eg$ echo > u/joeuser/.plan' /#foo' eg$ cd .. eg$ find . -name '#*' -print | xargs echo ./# ./# /u/joeuser/.plan /#foo