Can one pipe compound commands?

Question

My question is: can/how does one pipe compound commands ({ list; })? See Exhibit B. Exhibit A given for comparison's sake.

Exhibit A:

$ cat << EOF | xargs -n 1 echo           
foo
bar
qux
EOF
foo
bar
qux

Exhibit B:

$ cat << EOF | xargs -n 1 sh -c '{ var="$1"; echo "$var"; }'
foo
bar
qux
EOF

man sh:

-c               Read commands from the command_string operand
                            instead of from the standard input.  Special parame‐
                            ter 0 will be set from the command_name operand and
                            the positional parameters ($1, $2, etc.)  set from
                            the remaining argument operands.

Answer 1

The problem is that sh -c "something" needs another argument to become $0.

Your second example doesn't provide one, so the $1 is an empty string and you get your 3 blank lines. Use

cat << EOF | xargs -n 1 sh -c '{ var="$1"; echo "$var"; }' inlineshellscript
foo
bar
qux
EOF
food
bar
qux

In the script $0 is inlineshellscript. Normally I would use sh rather than inlineshellscript.