Jenkins pipeline sh does not seem to respect pipe in shell command

If your environment allows it, I've found a simple solution to this problem to be to place your script containing pipes into a file, and then run that with sh, like so:

script.sh:

#!/bin/sh
kubectl exec --container bla -i $(kubectl get pods | awk '/foo-/{ print $1 }') -- php /code/dostuff

Jenkinsfile:

stage('Run script with pipes') {
  steps {
    sh "./script.sh"
  }
}

I know this kind of late answer, but whoever you who needs the solution without eval you can use /bin/bash -c "script" to make pipe works

script {
    POM_VERSION = sh(script: "/bin/bash -c 'sed -n \'/<version>/,/<version/p\' pom.xml | head -1 | sed \'s/[[:blank:]]*<\/*version>//g\'\''", returnStdout: true)
    echo "${POM_VERSION}"
}

The only problem with this method is hellish escape yet this way the subshell of pipe will be handled by our boy /bin/bash -c

I finally put some thought into it and realized that pipe subshells are probably causing the issue. I know some of the evils of eval but I ended up wrappping this in an eval:

script {
    def ver_script = $/eval "sed -n '/<version>/,/<version/p' pom.xml | head -1 | sed 's/[[:blank:]]*<\/*version>//g'"/$
    echo "${ver_script}"
    POM_VERSION = sh(script: "${ver_script}", returnStdout: true)
    echo "${POM_VERSION}"
}