The stee command made
an appearance at day
1 already,
but it’s so useful to be it deserves its own mention.
While tee(1) copies standard input to standard output as well as the
file argument, stee is silent tee and doesn’t copy to standard output
(well, it throws the output away).
What’s that good for, you may wonder? Well, it allows you to write
into a file without having to setup a shell direction (nor fiddle with
argument strings as with dd of=...). This saves you an additional
layer of quoting:
% date | ssh localhost 'cat >/tmp/out'
% date | ssh localhost stee /tmp/out
Also, an often overlooked feature of tee is that it supports output
to multiple files. stee of course does as well:
% fortune | stee a b c
% sum a b c
51569 1 a
51569 1 b
51569 1 c
# echo min_power | stee /sys/class/scsi_host/*/link_power_management_policy
(Of course, a good shell can do that already internally.)
NP: Die Schnitter—Klöne