Question

What I want to do is:

>STRIPPER='sed s/admin_editable=\"[01]\"// | sed s/runtime_editable=\"[01]\"//'
>cat file.txt | $STRIPPER > stripped.txt  

i.e. define a shell variable which is a pipeline of multiple commands (mine happen to be sed‘s), that I can then call later. I’m doing this from the command line now, but may ultimately put it into a script.

I’ve tried both ‘ and ” for enclosing the command neither works.

sed: can't read |: No such file or directory
sed: can't read sed: No such file or directory
sed: can't read s/admin_editable=\"[01]\"//: No such file or directory
sed: can't read |sed: No such file or directory
sed: can't read s/runtime_editable=\"[01]\"//: No such file or directory
sed: can't read |: No such file or directory

I know that there is probably a single regex that could handle this case, but I’d like to know how to do the pipeline in general.

Answer 1

This is a great place to use a function rather than a variable.

stripper() {
    sed s/admin_editable="[01]"// | sed s/runtime_editable="[01]"//
}

cat file.txt | stripper > stripped.txt  

You could also eliminate the useless use of cat:

stripper < file.txt > stripped.txt