Oracle Linux - use tee to write to stdout and file

When writing scripting for Oracle Linux using Bash a very common scenario is that you want to write something to both the screen and to a file. In effect there is nothing that would prevent you from writing a line that will write to the screen and the other to write to a file. However, it is not that practical. You could decide to write a function that will take the line as input and will take both tasks. This will already limit the number of lines of code you might need. However a more gentle solution can be found in the tee command.

The tee command will read from standard input and write to standard output and files and can take the following flags:

-a, --append  : append to the given FILEs, do not overwrite

-i, --ignore-interrupts : ignore interrupt signals

so, in effect, if you want to write to screen and file in one single line of code you can use the tee command to achieve this. An example of this is shown below where we will write "Hello world" to both the screen and a file.

[root@docker consul]# echo "hello world" | tee /tmp/world.txt
hello world
[root@docker consul]# cat /tmp/world.txt 
hello world
[root@docker consul]# 

The nice thing about the tee command is that this will work for all output which is send to stdout. Meaning, you can spool almost everything to a file and show it on the screen at the same time.