Wrongly, of course :-) For this purpose the GNU version of xargs has the -0 switch which makes it expect to read filenames from standard input separated by NUL, and GNU find has a corresponding option -print0 which outputs in that format. But of course you can only use those if you know you'll never have to port to anything non-GNU, and nothing other than find will output in that format, and in any case the whole system ought ideally to have been set up so that it worked reliably without a user having to remember to add the special and obscure "work reliably" flag.