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    The way to avoid forking a new process for each line would be to pass the input lines to a single run of the tool to parse the quoted string and have the tool output the same data in some other, more suitable format. E.g. turn "foo" ="bar" into foo#bar, where the # is some character that will not appear in the actual data, e.g. a control character. (Say, tab; or \0x1F, the ASCII Unit separator; or just something random like \x01.) I would expect Bash in particular might be rather slow in single-char fiddling like this. Commented Feb 1 at 22:16
  • That does seem to be a sensible suggestion if attempting to handle all this in the same bash script proves too unwieldy or slow. Commented Feb 1 at 22:23