Question

Command wc has an option –files0-from=F. According to the manual, it reads input from the files specified by NUL-terminated names in file F; If F is – then read names from standard input. Why NUL-terminated names? Isn’t it more convenient just separating the names with newline or space?

Answer 1

It’s more convenient if you have filenames with spaces (or new-lines, or tabs) in them.

This is sometimes used with find -print0 that outputs its list of files with \0 as a separator instead of spaces.

$ find . -type f -print0 | wc -c --files0-from=-
15 ./c d
12 ./a b
27 total

xargs has a -0 option for similar reasons.