In my previous post, I used the tr utility to deal with needing to transform newlines into null characters. However, as I hoped when I put a request for a better way to do it in my Epistemic Status qualifier, a reader emailed me with a better solution!

If you’re using the GNU version of grep, it has a --null-data (shortened as -z) flag which makes grep treat its input as null-character-separated. You can combine that with the -print0 flag to find to get the same results as I got with tr (presumably with better performance because it doesn’t require doing the replacement in another tool):

$ find notes -name ".md" -print0 |\
  grep --null-data "notes/2020" |\
  xargs -0 wc -w

This reminded me that ripgrep has the same feature, with the same --null-data flag. Similarly, fd has a --print0 (-0) option. You can combine these and (if you like) cw¹ to get the same effect:

$ fd notes --print0 ".md" notes |\
  rg --null-data 'notes/2020' |\
  xargs -0 cw -w

Huzzah for versions of tools that understand these things and make this simpler than the solution I posted yesterday (and thanks to my reader for sending in that note)!