Reading a path from a nested grep yields "No such file or directory" Essentially, I have a file containing the path to another file. A single line looks like this. "/home/self/file" Now, separately... > cat "/home/self/file" blah blah ... > grep '".*"' /path/to/containing/file "/home/self/file" > cat $(grep '".*"' /path/to/containing/file) cat: "/home/self/file": No such file or directory The results are weird. How do I circumvent this?

It's because of the double quotes.

If possible modify the `path/to/containing/file` and remove the quotes. If not possible add a piped process (`tr` or `sed` or something similar) to remove the quotes from the process substitution.