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File: coreutils.info,  Node: tee invocation,  Up: Redirection
17.1 'tee': Redirect output to multiple files or processes
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The 'tee' command copies standard input to standard output and also to
any files given as arguments.  This is useful when you want not only to
send some data down a pipe, but also to save a copy.  Synopsis:
     tee [OPTION]... [FILE]...
   If a file being written to does not already exist, it is created.  If
a file being written to already exists, the data it previously contained
is overwritten unless the '-a' option is used.
   A FILE of '-' causes 'tee' to send another copy of input to standard
output, but this is typically not that useful as the copies are
interleaved.
   The program accepts the following options.  Also see *note Common
options::.
'-a'
'--append'
     Append standard input to the given files rather than overwriting
     them.
'-i'
'--ignore-interrupts'
     Ignore interrupt signals.
   The 'tee' command is useful when you happen to be transferring a
large amount of data and also want to summarize that data without
reading it a second time.  For example, when you are downloading a DVD
image, you often want to verify its signature or checksum right away.
The inefficient way to do it is simply:
     wget http://example.com/some.iso && sha1sum some.iso
   One problem with the above is that it makes you wait for the download
to complete before starting the time-consuming SHA1 computation.
Perhaps even more importantly, the above requires reading the DVD image
a second time (the first was from the network).
   The efficient way to do it is to interleave the download and SHA1
computation.  Then, you'll get the checksum for free, because the entire
process parallelizes so well:
     # slightly contrived, to demonstrate process substitution
     wget -O - http://example.com/dvd.iso \
       | tee >(sha1sum > dvd.sha1) > dvd.iso
   That makes 'tee' write not just to the expected output file, but also
to a pipe running 'sha1sum' and saving the final checksum in a file
named 'dvd.sha1'.
   Note, however, that this example relies on a feature of modern shells
called "process substitution" (the '>(command)' syntax, above; *Note
Process Substitution: (bash)Process Substitution.), so it works with
'zsh', 'bash', and 'ksh', but not with '/bin/sh'.  So if you write code
like this in a shell script, be sure to start the script with
'#!/bin/bash'.
   Since the above example writes to one file and one process, a more
conventional and portable use of 'tee' is even better:
     wget -O - http://example.com/dvd.iso \
       | tee dvd.iso | sha1sum > dvd.sha1
   You can extend this example to make 'tee' write to two processes,
computing MD5 and SHA1 checksums in parallel.  In this case, process
substitution is required:
     wget -O - http://example.com/dvd.iso \
       | tee >(sha1sum > dvd.sha1) \
             >(md5sum > dvd.md5) \
       > dvd.iso
   This technique is also useful when you want to make a _compressed_
copy of the contents of a pipe.  Consider a tool to graphically
summarize disk usage data from 'du -ak'.  For a large hierarchy, 'du
-ak' can run for a long time, and can easily produce terabytes of data,
so you won't want to rerun the command unnecessarily.  Nor will you want
to save the uncompressed output.
   Doing it the inefficient way, you can't even start the GUI until
after you've compressed all of the 'du' output:
     du -ak | gzip -9 > /tmp/du.gz
     gzip -d /tmp/du.gz | xdiskusage -a
   With 'tee' and process substitution, you start the GUI right away and
eliminate the decompression completely:
     du -ak | tee >(gzip -9 > /tmp/du.gz) | xdiskusage -a
   Finally, if you regularly create more than one type of compressed
tarball at once, for example when 'make dist' creates both
'gzip'-compressed and 'bzip2'-compressed tarballs, there may be a better
way.  Typical 'automake'-generated 'Makefile' rules create the two
compressed tar archives with commands in sequence, like this (slightly
simplified):
     tardir=your-pkg-M.N
     tar chof - "$tardir" | gzip  -9 -c > your-pkg-M.N.tar.gz
     tar chof - "$tardir" | bzip2 -9 -c > your-pkg-M.N.tar.bz2
   However, if the hierarchy you are archiving and compressing is larger
than a couple megabytes, and especially if you are using a
multi-processor system with plenty of memory, then you can do much
better by reading the directory contents only once and running the
compression programs in parallel:
     tardir=your-pkg-M.N
     tar chof - "$tardir" \
       | tee >(gzip -9 -c > your-pkg-M.N.tar.gz) \
       | bzip2 -9 -c > your-pkg-M.N.tar.bz2
   An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value
indicates failure.