Directory goes missing when piping basename from dirname

Given the folder structure

/recipes/foo/.env
/recipes/bar/.env

Running the following command:

find ./recipes -type f -name '.env' -print0 | xargs -0 dirname | xargs -0 basename

Output:
foo

Trimming the command down to:

find ./recipes -type f -name '.env' -print0 | xargs -0 dirname

Output:
./recipes/bar
./recipes/foo

So for some reason piping dirname to basename causes me to lose some of the found directories.

>Solution :

There are 2 issues here:

1. The -0 option of xargs indicates that the inputs are NUL-separated, not the outputs. In order to pipe the output of xargs -0 dirname to xargs -0 something you must use the -z option of dirname. Else, its output is newline-separated.

2. basename does not support multiple arguments by default. If yours supports it you can try -a or --multiple.

find ./recipes -type f -name '.env' -print0 |
  xargs -0 dirname -z | xargs -0 basename -a