xargs is fucked up when it comes to handling spaces in filenames and such. In fact, this is pretty much the only reason I use GNU parallel — I rarely need to actually run stuff in parallel (but it usually doesn't hurt either), but I need to do something pretty complicated (list | grep | sort | uniq | feed it to feh / whatever) over multiple arguments, without having to worry if these arguments contain spaces, quotes, unicode symbols, etc.
Oh yeah, great I idea. Now insert sorting somewhere between the pipes and use at least one filename with '"' character. Good luck with your xargs. parallel handles all this automatically, you don't even have to know there might be any problems with escaping here.
