How can I output to both console and a file?

trewsfan · 08-17-2006, 04:19 PM

Suppose I am in a terminal.

Running: $ date
-> outputs the date to the terminal

Running: $ date >> outputfile.txt
-> outputs the date to the file outputfile.txt

What's the easiest way to send the same output to both the terminal and to the file?

HappyTux · 08-17-2006, 04:22 PM

date ; date >> outputfile.txt

trewsfan · 08-17-2006, 04:30 PM

Thanks, but that's not the same output. That's running two commands one after the other.

HappyTux · 08-17-2006, 04:47 PM

What the milliseconds are going to matter date only resolves to the second anyways your never going to see a difference.

syg00 · 08-17-2006, 05:02 PM

Simply pipe the output to tee - exactly what it was designed for.
manpage.

trewsfan · 08-17-2006, 05:09 PM

Tee is exactly what I needed. Thanks.

Tux, it's because I'm not using this for the date command. I wanted it for the rsync command which has very different outputs when run consecutively.

Example of how to use tee:

tyler@pago:~/simple$ ls
tyler@pago:~/simple$ date | tee output.txt
Thu Aug 17 17:06:46 CDT 2006
tyler@pago:~/simple$ ls
output.txt
tyler@pago:~/simple$ cat output.txt
Thu Aug 17 17:06:46 CDT 2006
tyler@pago:~/simple$

HappyTux · 08-17-2006, 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by trewsfan

Tee is exactly what I needed. Thanks.

Tux, it's because I'm not using this for the date command. I wanted it for the rsync command which has very different outputs when run consecutively.

Example of how to use tee:

tyler@pago:~/simple$ ls
tyler@pago:~/simple$ date | tee output.txt
Thu Aug 17 17:06:46 CDT 2006
tyler@pago:~/simple$ ls
output.txt
tyler@pago:~/simple$ cat output.txt
Thu Aug 17 17:06:46 CDT 2006
tyler@pago:~/simple$

Ah I see was kinda wondering why it mattered for a simple date command.

Edit: Your going to want tee -a then for the example you first gave but I would image you have read the man page and discovery this anyways.