No longer includes an xargs invocation. A response to https://sonomu.club/@gavcloud/104243111086171881 that I'm not sure is entirely reasonable. May or may not work on a Mac. The original question was how to do something like the intent of: alias lst "!cat ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/nnn/.selection | xargs -0 -I fname echo "put" \'fname\' > files.lftp" This is a good example of how ridiculously painful quote escaping is in the shell, and how I don't really have a good set of general habits for avoiding these problems, apart from doing this kind of thing in a general purpose programming language instead of involving the shell.