That's still just a shell problem since the shell is expanding `find` and placing the unquoted result into the command line. Some non-POSIX shells don't have this issue. For example with murex you could use either of these two syntaxes:

    ls -l ${find ./ name *abc*}
    # return the result as a single string

    ls -l @{find ./ name *abc*}
    # return the result as an array (like Bourn shell)

So in the first example, the command run would look something like:

    ls -l "foo abc bar"

whereas in the second it would behave more like Bourne shell:

    ls -l foo abc bar

As an aside, the example you provided also wouldn't work in Bourne shell because the asterisks would be expanded by the shell rather than `find`. So you'd need to quote that string:

    ls -l `find ./ -name "*abc*"`

This also isn't a problem in murex because you can specify whether to audo-expand globbing or not.

With POSIX shells you end up with quotation mark soup:

    ls -l "`find ./ -name '*abc*'`"

(and we're lucky in this example that we don't need to nest any of the same quotation marks. It often gets uglier than this!)

Murex also solves this problem by supporting open and close quote marks via S-Expression-style parentheses:

    ls -l (${find ./ -name (*abc*)})

Which is massively more convenient when you'd normally end up having to escape double quotes in POSIX shells.

---

Now I'm not trying to advocate murex as a Bash-killer, my point is that it's specifically the design of POSIX shells that cause these problems and not the way Unix pipelines work.

Ah, more problems with shell expansion and substitution.

Pipelines to the rescue. If you used a pipeline instead of shell expansion, it can deal with spaces just peachy.

    $ find . -name "*abc*" -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

There's no argument that bash (and other shells) make dealing with spaces and quotes troublesome. That has nothing to do with pipelines.

Does every unix utility suport -print0 or similar?

My point wasn't specifically about find, but about the problems of text and other unstructured input/output in general.

Update: reading a bit around the internet, it looks like it's not possible to do something like this :

    find / -print0 | \
        grep something | \
        xargs -0 cat

As grep will mangle the output from find -print0.

And note that, all the way in my original argument, I complained that every command used a different way of spelling that changed delimiter character.