Supernoob: Help me Remove Intermediate Files

[deuteros]

Hello again. Thanks to the folks who helped me work out the parameter problem!

However, since I'm not 100% on how output is piped into STDIN as opposed to text files, I'm getting some weirdness when attempting to replace the "temp" file below with a variable/pipe:

#!/bin/bash

filename=$1

tr ' ' x < $filename | sed 's/$/\n/' > temp

supnums=`grep 'X-\|X$' temp | sed 's/,5,.*$//'`

    for sups in $supnums

        do
            grep "^$sups,4" temp | sed 's/.*4,//'
        done

I've tried assigning the output of line 5 to a variable called "nospaces", then grepping the cat of $nospaces, but the ` symbol is making the output of the cat | grep execute as a command. Consequently I get a bunch of annoying "command not found" lines as output.

O great and powerful penguins, can you help me on this quest?

[deuteros]

I suppose I wasn't being very clear. This is my attempt to remove the file "temp" from the script, by replacing it with a variable, $nospaces:

#!/bin/bash

filename=$1

nospaces=`tr ' ' x < $filename | sed 's/$/\n/'`

supnums=`echo $nospaces | grep 'X-\|X$' | sed 's/,5,.*$//'`

    for sups in $supnums

        do
            echo $nospaces | grep "^$sups,4" | sed 's/.*4,//'
        done

Unfortunately I get no output whatsoever, though given the time it took to run, I know the loop was working. That's what I meant by the 'weirdness' -- output direction into files makes newlines where I expect them, but the newlines seem to disappear when I assign the output to variables. Anyone know what I mean? Is there a cure for this that doesn't involve making a temp file?

[mizzle]

Here is the line you need to change:

nospaces=$(tr ' ' x < $filename | sed 's/$/\n/')

[deuteros]

I'm afraid that didn't work -- all the newlines are still being removed when I call $nospaces. Maybe it's got something to do with my build?

EDIT:

I've decided to alter the regexp I was using for the program -- which I can do now that I've learned the basics of AWK. So I don't care if the variable preserves lines anymore. Thanks anyway