Rubenerd

In today’s installment of things you already know, unless you don’t, I’m visiting the stupendously useful tee(1) command. I use it daily, yet I see plenty of scripts that brute force alternatives to it. It’s one of the most common superfluous uses of cat(1) I see.

tee(1) duplicates standard output, letting you preview output and write it to a file. Why would you want to do this? Say you want to capture the output of a fancy script by redirecting it to a file:

$ ./reuschling.sh > output.log

What did that script do? We wouldn’t know, unless we viewed the log file. To show us the output and write to a file, we can pipe the script output to tee(1), which will print the output and write to a target file:

$ ./reuschling.sh | tee output.log
==> this is the output of a fancy script

If we inspect the file:

$ cat output.log
==> this is the output of a fancy script

Nice! You can also append to an existing file with -a, the same way you’d redirect with >> in a script:

$ ./reuschling.sh >> output.log
$ ./reuschling.sh | tee -a output.log
==> this is the output of a fancy script

And checking it again having run those two lines:

$ cat reuschling.log
==> this is the output of a fancy script
==> this is the output of a fancy script
==> this is the output of a fancy script

Even the name of this tool is cool. If you picture a letter T and follow the vertical stroke upwards, it branches into two… clever! Or if you stitched the top of a tee-shirt shut, then started filling the bottom with whipped cream, eventually it’ll come out of the arms.