To be fair, it's possible to make this block simpler and more readable than what you have there. The problem with a lot of bash scripts I've seen is that they j

To be fair, it's possible to make this block simpler and more readable than what you have there. The problem with a lot of bash scripts I've seen is that they just duck-tape layer after layer of complexity on top of each other, instead of breaking things into smaller, composable pieces. Here's a quick refactor for the block that I would say is simpler and easier to maintain. function xform() { local dir="$1" ls -1 "$dir" | grep '\d\d\d\d_A.csv' | cut -c 1-4 | python3 parse.py | uniq } comm -1 -3 <(xform dataset-directory) <(seq 500)