TEE(1)

📦
version 9.12 · 28 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 tee(1) — User Commands 💖

okay bestie, pull up a chair, because we're talking about tee, from the GNU coreutils squad, and she is literally the group-chat relay of the Unix world 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

tee — read from standard input and write to standard output and files. it's giving "why not both" 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

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

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the whole vibe: tee takes what you feed it on standard input, copies it to each FILE you list, and also drops it on standard output. every output gets the same tea, no cap ☕✨

she's named after the plumbing T-joint btw, because she splits one stream into many. iykyk.

the options, bestie 👑

  • -a, --append — append to the given FILEs instead of overwriting them. your old content stays, new stuff just gets added to the end 🌱
  • -i, --ignore-interrupts — ignore interrupt signals. she's unbothered. unbothered. flawless. 😌
  • -p — operate in a more appropriate MODE with pipes 🪄
  • --output-error[=MODE] — set the behavior when a write error happens. the MODE tea is all the way down below 👇
  • --help — display this help and exit 🆘
  • --version — output version information and exit 🏷️

🌈 MODE 🌈

okay so MODE is what decides how she acts when writes to the outputs go wrong. the options are:

  • warn — diagnose errors writing to any output
  • warn-nopipe — diagnose errors writing to any output not a pipe
  • exit — exit on error writing to any output
  • exit-nopipe — exit on error writing to any output not a pipe

the default MODE for the -p option is 'warn-nopipe'. and with "nopipe" MODEs, she exits immediately if all outputs become broken pipes.

and if you never specify --output-error at all? the default operation is to exit immediately on error writing to a pipe, and diagnose errors writing to non pipe outputs. noted. periodt. 💀

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Written by Mike Parker, Richard M. Stallman, and David MacKenzie. legends fr fr 🫡

🐛 REPORTING BUGS 🐛

found a bug? tell the girlies:

Copyright © 2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. (yes bestie, no warranty, she said what she said 🙈)

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

and that's the whole page, angel 💖 this was GNU coreutils 9.12, dated September 2026 — now go pipe something and slay ✨🦋💅

📦 where this page comes from