Tee command is used to store and view (both at the same time) the output of any other command.
Tee command writes to the STDOUT, and to a file at a time as shown in the examples below.
Example 1: Write output to stdout, and also to a file
The following command displays output only on the screen (stdout).
$ ls
The following command writes the output only to the file and not to the screen.
$ ls > file
The following command (with the help of tee command) writes the output both to the screen (stdout) and to the file.
$ ls | tee file
Example 2: Write the output to two commands
You can also use tee command to store the output of a command to a file and redirect the same output as an input to another command.
The following command will take a backup of the crontab entries, and pass the crontab entries as an input to sed command which will do the substituion. After the substitution, it will be added as a new cron job.
$ crontab -l | tee crontab-backup.txt | sed 's/old/new/' | crontab –
Misc Tee Command Operations
By default tee command overwrites the file. You can instruct tee command to append to the file using the option –a as shown below.
$ ls | tee –a file
You can also write the output to multiple files as shown below.
$ ls | tee file1 file2 file3
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