Why does xargs strip quotes from input?

Question

Why does xargs strip quotes from input text?

Here is a simplified example:

echo "/Place/='http://www.google.com'" | xargs echo

outputs

/Place/=http://www.google.com

Is there any way to work-around this? (xargs -0 doesn't help me)

Answer 1

From the xargs manual:

If you want an input argument to contain blanks or horizontal tabs, enclose it in double quotes or apostrophes. If the argument contains a double quote character ("), you must enclose the argument in apostrophes. Conversely, if the argument contains an apostrophe ('), you must enclose the argument in double quotes. You can also put a backslash (\) in front of a character to tell xargs to ignore any special meaning the character may have (for example, white space characters, or quotes).

This means you can escape quotes if the quotes are quoted themselves:

$ echo "/Place/=\'http://www.google.com\'" | xargs echo
/Place/='http://www.google.com'

will work but echo /Place/=\'http://www.google.com\' | xargs echo will not.

Answer 2

You could use GNU Parallel instead:

$ echo "/Place/='http://www.google.com'" | parallel echo
/Place/='http://www.google.com'

Then you do not have to do the quoting yourself.

Learn more: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1