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  • What is your operating system? Is your /bin/sh bash or is it dash? Or something else? Commented Nov 16 at 12:58
  • If you want to do stuff combining sed, shell, function calls, etc then do yourself a favour and just use perl. It'll be easier, far more capable, faster, and you won't end up getting lost in a maze of twisty little quotation marks. Simple example: echo bar | perl -pe 'BEGIN{sub myfoo {my $str = shift; return "foo $str"}}; s/.*/myfoo $&/e' (sure, this trivial example doesn't need the /e modifier OR a function, but it does illustrate what's possible and how much easier it is than doing it in shell). people try to do too much in shell, a language that makes easy things needlessly difficult. Commented Nov 16 at 14:35
  • What is your /bin/sh? Is it perhaps a symlink to bash? Does this work if you run export -f printf_stdin before your first command? Commented Nov 17 at 16:33