How can I print intermediate results from a pipeline to the screen?

Question

I'm trying to count the lines from a command and I'd also like to see the lines as they go by. My initial thought was to use the tee command:

complicated_command | tee - | wc -l

But that simply doubles the line count using GNU tee or copies output to a file named - on Solaris.

Searching is never perfect, especially with this sort of command. — Adam Davis, Feb 28 '09 at 00:17
google site:stackoverflow.com and it will find u everything :p — Johannes Schaub - litb, Feb 28 '09 at 00:22
I think it is better in [unix.stackexchange](http://unix.stackexchange.com/). — jezrael, Dec 18 '15 at 07:33

Paul Tomblin · Accepted Answer · 2009-02-28T00:16:04.990

6

complicated_command | tee /dev/tty | wc -l

But keep in mind that if you put it in a script and redirect the output, it won't do what you expect.

edited Feb 28 '09 at 00:16

answered Feb 28 '09 at 00:04

Paul Tomblin

Thanks. I wonder why I didn't know that /dev/tty points to my terminal name. Glad I asked since that reduces my code a bit. – Jon 'links in bio' Ericson Feb 28 '09 at 00:26
Yeah, /dev/tty is an alias for your current tty. It's very useful like that. – Paul Tomblin Feb 28 '09 at 01:06

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 27 '09 at 23:55

1

The solution is to tee to the console directly as opposed to STDOUT:

tty=`tty`
complicated_command | tee $tty | wc -l

answered Feb 27 '09 at 23:55

2 Answers2