Sadly shell is not very good at string manipulation :-/ I would pipe the string to something like this and read it back into an array of lines (readarray):

Sadly shell is not very good at string manipulation :-/ I would pipe the string to something like this and read it back into an array of lines (readarray): python -c 'print sys.stdin.read().split(", ")' Or you can use sed and use read -d $'\x01': echo -n "$mystr" | sed $'s/, /\x01/ That will handle newlines but not the 0x01 byte. I think really a shell should have the ability to iterate over bytes/code points reasonably efficiently to do arbitrary string processing. Python isn't great at this either, since it creates a lot of 1 byte string objects.