Reading a path from a nested grep yields "No such file or directory"

Question

Essentially, I have a file containing the path to another file. A single line looks like this.

"/home/self/file"

Now, separately...

> cat "/home/self/file"
blah blah
...

> grep '".*"' /path/to/containing/file
"/home/self/file"

> cat $(grep '".*"' /path/to/containing/file)
cat: "/home/self/file": No such file or directory

The results are weird. How do I circumvent this?

Answer 1

It's because of the double quotes.

If possible modify the path/to/containing/file and remove the quotes. If not possible add a piped process (tr or sed or something similar) to remove the quotes from the process substitution.