I'm writing a bash script to search the contents of a postfix log. To keep the script's output readable (since multiple lines from the log file need to be echo'ed) I am setting the IFS variable to an empty string so that the line breaks in my grep results are preserved. I am storing the results to a variable. Later in the script, I want to search the entire output as a single line of text. I am not sure if it is possible to make sed consider the results in this variable as a single line, so I am trying to simply remove all the line breaks using the following:

str1=${results//\n/}