This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface
Contents
Application Usage
The tee utility is usually used in a pipeline, to make a copy of the output of some utility.
The file operand is technically optional, but tee is no more useful than cat when none is specified.
Asynchronous Events
Default, except that if the -i option was specified, SIGINT shall be ignored.
Consequences Of Errors
If a write to any successfully opened file operand fails, writes to other successfully opened file
operands and standard output shall continue, but the exit status shall be non-zero. Otherwise, the
default actions specified in Section1.4, UtilityDescriptionDefaults apply.
Thefollowingsectionsareinformative.Copyright
Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard
for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base
Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C) 2018 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original
IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document.
The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .
Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most likely to have been introduced
during the conversion of the source files to man page format. To report such errors, see
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .
IEEE/The Open Group 2017 TEE(1POSIX)
Description
The tee utility shall copy standard input to standard output, making a copy in zero or more files. The
tee utility shall not buffer output.
If the -a option is not specified, output files shall be written (see Section1.1.1.4, FileRead, Write,
andCreation.
Environment Variables
The following environment variables shall affect the execution of tee:
LANG Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See the
Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section8.2, InternationalizationVariables for the
precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale
categories.)
LC_ALL If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization
variables.
LC_CTYPE Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters
(for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
LC_MESSAGES
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic
messages written to standard error.
NLSPATH Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.
Examples
Save an unsorted intermediate form of the data in a pipeline:
... | tee unsorted | sort > sorted
Exit Status
The following exit values shall be returned:
0 The standard input was successfully copied to all output files.
>0 An error occurred.
Extended Description
None.
Future Directions
None.
Input Files
None.
Name
tee — duplicate standard input
Operands
The following operands shall be supported:
file A pathname of an output file. If a file operand is '-', it shall refer to a file named -;
implementations shall not treat it as meaning standard output. Processing of at least 13 file
operands shall be supported.
Options
The tee utility shall conform to the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section12.2, UtilitySyntaxGuidelines.
The following options shall be supported:
-a Append the output to the files.
-i Ignore the SIGINT signal.
Output Files
If any file operands are specified, the standard input shall be copied to each named file.
Prolog
This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface
may differ (consult the corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the interface
may not be implemented on Linux.
Rationale
The buffering requirement means that tee is not allowed to use ISO C standard fully buffered or line-
buffered writes. It does not mean that tee has to do 1-byte reads followed by 1-byte writes.
It should be noted that early versions of BSD ignore any invalid options and accept a single '-' as an
alternative to -i. They also print a message if unable to open a file:
"tee: cannot access %s\n", <pathname>
Historical implementations ignore write errors. This is explicitly not permitted by this volume of
POSIX.1‐2017.
Some historical implementations use O_APPEND when providing append mode; others use the lseek() function
to seek to the end-of-file after opening the file without O_APPEND. This volume of POSIX.1‐2017 requires
functionality equivalent to using O_APPEND; see Section1.1.1.4, FileRead, Write, andCreation.
See Also
Chapter1, Introduction, cat
The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter8, EnvironmentVariables, Section12.2, UtilitySyntaxGuidelines
The System Interfaces volume of POSIX.1‐2017, lseek()
Stderr
The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.
Stdin
The standard input can be of any type.
Stdout
The standard output shall be a copy of the standard input.
Synopsis
tee [-ai][file...]