How can I use xargs to copy files that have spaces and quotes in their names?

You can combine all of that into a single find command:

find . -iname "*foobar*" -exec cp -- "{}" ~/foo/bar \;

This will handle filenames and directories with spaces in them. You can use -name to get case-sensitive results.

Note: The -- flag passed to cp prevents it from processing files starting with - as options.

find . -print0 | grep --null 'FooBar' | xargs -0 ...

I don't know about whether grep supports --null, nor whether xargs supports -0, on Leopard, but on GNU it's all good.

This is more efficient as it does not run "cp" multiple times:

find -name '*FooBar*' -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t ~/foo/bar

Look into using the --null commandline option for xargs with the -print0 option in find.

I have found that the following syntax works well for me.

find /usr/pcapps/ -mount -type f -size +1000000c | perl -lpe ' s{ }{\\ }g ' | xargs ls -l | sort +4nr | head -200

In this example, I am looking for the largest 200 files over 1,000,000 bytes in the filesystem mounted at "/usr/pcapps".

The Perl line-liner between "find" and "xargs" escapes/quotes each blank so "xargs" passes any filename with embedded blanks to "ls" as a single argument.

Frame challenge — you're asking how to use xargs. The answer is: you don't use xargs, because you don't need it.

The comment by user80168 describes a way to do this directly with cp, without calling cp for every file:

find . -name '*FooBar*' -exec cp -t /tmp -- {} +

This works because:

• the cp -t flag allows to give the target directory near the beginning of cp, rather than near the end. From man cp:

   -t, --target-directory=DIRECTORY
         copy all SOURCE arguments into DIRECTORY

• The -- flag tells cp to interpret everything after as a filename, not a flag, so files starting with - or -- do not confuse cp; you still need this because the -/-- characters are interpreted by cp, whereas any other special characters are interpreted by the shell.

• The find -exec command {} + variant essentially does the same as xargs. From man find:

   -exec command {} +                                                     
         This  variant  of the -exec action runs the specified command on
         the selected files, but the command line is built  by  appending
         each  selected file name at the end; the total number of invoca‐
         matched  files.   The command line is built in much the same way
         that xargs builds its command lines.  Only one instance of  `{}'
         is  allowed  within the command, and (when find is being invoked
         from a shell) it should be quoted (for example, '{}') to protect
         it  from  interpretation  by shells.  The command is executed in
         the starting directory.  If any invocation  returns  a  non-zero
         value  as exit status, then find returns a non-zero exit status.
         If find encounters an error, this can sometimes cause an immedi‐
         ate  exit, so some pending commands may not be run at all.  This
         variant of -exec always returns true.

By using this in find directly, this avoids the need of a pipe or a shell invocation, such that you don't need to worry about any nasty characters in filenames.

Be aware that most of the options discussed in other answers are not standard on platforms that do not use the GNU utilities (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, for instance). See the POSIX specification for 'standard' xargs behaviour.

I also find the behaviour of xargs whereby it runs the command at least once, even with no input, to be a nuisance.

I wrote my own private version of xargs (xargl) to deal with the problems of spaces in names (only newlines separate - though the 'find ... -print0' and 'xargs -0' combination is pretty neat given that file names cannot contain ASCII NUL '\0' characters. My xargl isn't as complete as it would need to be to be worth publishing - especially since GNU has facilities that are at least as good.

bill_starr's Perl version won't work well for embedded newlines (only copes with spaces). For those on e.g. Solaris where you don't have the GNU tools, a more complete version might be (using sed)...

find -type f | sed 's/./\\&/g' | xargs grep string_to_find

adjust the find and grep arguments or other commands as you require, but the sed will fix your embedded newlines/spaces/tabs.