The xargs
command takes white space characters (tabs, spaces, new lines) as delimiters.
You can narrow it down only for the new line characters (‘\n’) with -d
option like this:
ls *.mp3 | xargs -d '\n' mplayer
It works only with GNU xargs.
For MacOS:
ls *.mp3 | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 mplayer
The more simplistic and practically useful approach (when don’t need to process the filenames further):
mplayer *.mp3