TEE(1)

✨ TEE(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to TEE(1) from the General Commands Manual — she's a little legend and honestly the moment you learn her you'll never shut up about her. sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, let's go.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

tee — copies standard input to each FILE, and also to standard output. yes she does both. she's an overachiever like that. 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

tee [OPTION]... [FILE]...

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Copy standard input to each FILE, and also to standard output. that's it, that's the whole job. she reads what you pipe in, drops a copy in every FILE you name, and also lets it fall through to stdout so the next program in the pipe can have some too. sharing is caring, no cap. 💖

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -h, --help — Print help. she'll tell you how to use her, very demure.
• -a, --append — append to the given FILEs, do not overwrite. literally "and" instead of "instead of" — your existing content survives. king behavior 👑
• -i, --ignore-interrupts — ignore interrupt signals (ignored on non-Unix platforms). so she just. does not flinch. 😭
• -p — set write error behavior (ignored on non-Unix platforms).
• --output-error — set write error behavior. pick your fighter:

Possible values:

• warn: produce warnings for errors writing to any output
• warn-nopipe: produce warnings for errors that are not pipe errors (ignored on non-unix platforms)
• exit: exit on write errors to any output
• exit-nopipe: exit on write errors to any output that are not pipe errors (equivalent to exit on non-unix platforms)

• -V, --version — Print version. she'll tell you her age 🫶
• [file]

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💜 EXTRA 💜

If a FILE is -, it refers to a file named -. not stdin, bestie, an actual file whose name is one single dash. the way that trips people up every single time... thermonuclear 💀

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🌈 VERSION 🌈

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🌟 EXAMPLES 🌟

Copy stdin to each file, and also to stdout:

echo "example" | tee path/to/file

Append to the given files, do not overwrite:

echo "example" | tee [-a|--append] path/to/file

Print stdin to the terminal, and also pipe it into another program for further processing:

echo "example" | tee /dev/tty | xargs printf "[%s]"

Create a directory called "example", count the number of characters in "example", and write "example" to the terminal:

echo "example" | tee >(xargs mkdir) >(wc [-c|--bytes])

⚠️ heads up bestie: the examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail. not her fault, she's still growing 🌱

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and that's the page, angel 💖 this was TEE(1), dated 2026-09-25, and we are SO obsessed. go pipe something into something else. mwah. 🫶✨