peet(1)

💖 peet — piped reverse tee, but make it bestie energy 💖

okay so this is the manual for peet, which lives in section 1 of the manual (that's the "User Commands" section, iykyk). It's a little tool that reads from a whole pile of file descriptors and copies literally everything into one single file descriptor. Reverse tee. Tee but backwards. It's giving unhinged plumbing in the best way 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

peet — piped reverse tee: read from many file descriptors and copy to one 🫶

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

peet [-h] [-b size] [-w outfd] infd1 [infd2 ...]

like. that's it. that's the whole vibe.

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So peet reads from a bunch of file descriptors and copies all of it to one file descriptor. And if you don't hand it a file descriptor to write to (aka you skip the -w option), it just defaults to 1, which is stdout. Classic. Reliable. Iconic.

Now here's the tea ☕ — peet without the -b option reads whatever data is available on each fd and writes it straight out to the output file descriptor. For each input fd, one read happens. That read grabs a maximum of 4096 bytes at a time. And for each read, one write happens.

⚠️ bestie listen — this means the output data might be scattered randomly between the different input streams. It's not gonna come out all neat and ordered. It's a chaos girlie and that's the deal.

When you do specify the -b option, that number is seen as bytes in a block. A write only gets executed when there are complete blocks in the input buffer. So it waits for full blocks before it ships anything out. Patient queen. 👑

And fun fact: peet can be used together with pipexec(1) to de-multiplex text based output. Very slay, very demux. 🌈

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -h — print help and version information. the little "hi bestie here's what I do" moment ✨
• -b num — Reads always num bytes before writing them. waits for the full block, no crumbs 🍓
• -w outfd — use the given outfd as output file descriptor. If this option is not specified, 1 (stdout) is used. the default is always the default fr fr

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

Example one: read from stdin (fd 0), and file descriptors 9 and 11 and write to stdout. 🦋

peet 0 9 11

Example two: using pipexec(1). Start two commands, both write their log to stdout, and use one instance of rotatelogs(1) to write the logs to disk into a common log file. (The file descriptors 8 and 11 are chosen by random — random queen behavior, no notes.) 💜

pipexec [ CMD1 /usr/bin/cmd1 ] [ CMD2 /usr/bin/cmd2 ] \
  [ PEET /usr/bin/peet 8 11 ] \
  [ RLOGS /usr/bin/rotatelogs /var/log/%Y%m%d_cmd.log ] \
  "{CMD1:1>PEET:8}" "{CMD2:1>PEET:11}" \
  "{PEET:1>RLOGS:0}"

like look at that. two commands, one peet, one rotatelogs, all holding hands. the file descriptor wiring is giving main character energy and honestly? obsessed. 🫶

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🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

pipexec(1), peet(1), rotatelogs(1), tee(1)

(yes peet(1) is in the SEE ALSO of peet(1). self-love. we stan a confident manual page. 💖)

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Written by Andreas Florath (andreas@florath.net) — thank you for the gift, king ✨

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📜 COPYRIGHT 📜

Copyright © 2015,2023 by Andreas Florath (andreas@florath.net). License GPLv2+: GNU GPL version 2 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.

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ok that's the whole page, you're fully caught up, no cap 🧚

and that's a wrap on the User Commands version, dated 2023-03-27, page peet(1) — go forth and reverse-tee responsibly, bestie 💖🌸💅