title: xargs input involving spaces
body: <p>I am working on a Mac using OSX and I'm using bash as my shell. I have a script that goes something to the effect of:</p>
  
  <pre><code>VAR1="pass me into parallel please!"
  VAR2="oh me too, and there's actually a lot of us, but its best we stay here too"
  printf "%s\n" {0..249} | xargs -0 -P 8 -n 1 . ./parallel.sh
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get the error: <code>xargs: .: Permission denied</code>. The purpose is to run a another script in parallel (called parallel.sh) which get's fed the numbers 0-249. Additionally I want to make sure that parallel can see and us VAR1 and VAR2. But when I try to source the script parallel with <code>. ./parallel</code>, xargs doesn't like that. The point of sourcing is because the script has other variables I wish parallel to have access to.</p>
  
  <p>I have read something about using print0 since xargs separates it's inputs by spaces, but I really didn't understand what -print0 does and how to use it. Thanks for any help you guys can offer.</p>