xargs supports escaping of newline characters with backslash. xargs -0 is neither part of POSIX nor the LSB.
This patch removes the -0 option and adjusts the input to xargs accordingly; that is, the input is a text file not ending in an incomplete line, and the newline of interest is preceded by a backslash.
Note: The treatment of escaped newline characters is not as clearly specified by POSIX as for escaped blank characters; however, the same can be said for escaped backslashes. It is slightly more clear for the case where the -I option is used; however, -I is also of limited portability.