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  • Note you can use ~ fine in POSIX sh, no need to switch $HOME. In some shells ~ can expand to the user's home even when $HOME is not defined. See the -d '\n' option of GNU xargs to make one argument out of each line. Commented Mar 17 at 6:56
  • In the last one, mv's -i won't work properly as stdin will be either filelist.txt or /dev/null (the latter with GNU xargs). See xargs -rd '\n' -a filelist.txt bash -c '...' bash with GNU xargs to avoid the issue. Commented Mar 17 at 7:00
  • @StéphaneChazelas Thanks. I'll remove the -i from all code. The original code in the question didn't have it anyway. Commented Mar 17 at 7:26
  • @StéphaneChazelas As for the tilde, it's a habit of mine to use tilde on the command line by the variable in scripts. If the variable is undefined in a script, then that's an appropriately serious issue that warrants a script to fail. Commented Mar 17 at 7:34
  • mv might still prompt the user even without -i which would cause problems in those xargs implementations that don't reopen stdin on /dev/null. You could add a </dev/null within the bash code if you don't want to introduce more GNUisms. Commented Mar 17 at 8:09