Yes, grep is line oriented. To rewrite parts of lines, we use "sed" instead:

command | sed 's/|>//' > outfile.txt

Would remove the first "|>" sequence it found in each line. If you want to remove *all* such, it's 's/|>//g' (g suffix to sed substitute command).

sed can also remove whole lines:

command | sed '/foobar/d'

Matches line with "foobar" within them and deletes them. I point this out because sed can run with a whole list of rules (provided by a file) and thus can probably do all your folding, spindling, and mutilating with a single "sed" command. If the file cleanup.sed had the two lines:

/Receiving/d
s/|>//g

Then running it with:

command | sed -f cleanup.sed > output.txt

Would both trim off lines with "Receiving" as well as remove the character sequence |> (without otherwise changing the line).

Andy