Tee Command Usage Examples

http://linux.101hacks.com/unix/tee-command-examples/

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