Reduced spawned processes and subshells of the script by about half

As you can see here, the rearranging of certain if groups and reducing the number of times cat was piped into grep, the spawned processes and subshells from the script have been reduced by about 50%:

    # wc -l before_changes.txt after_changes.txt 
     132 before_changes.txt
      65 after_changes.txt
     197 total

This was generated using bash -x to get those lines.
remove the trailing / from /dev/null/