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So, I understand that by using 'tee' I can redirect the output of a command such as 'ping' to stdout as well as a file.

For example:

> ping google.com | tee somefile

This would display the ping statistics on terminal and write them to 'somefile'.

Now, if I wish to modify the output from 'ping', I can use 'cut' in such a way:

> ping google.com | cut -d' ' -f 1

But, if I wish to use all the three commands together, I get a no output on stdout and an empty file.

> ping google.com | cut -d' ' -f 1 | tee somefile

What am I doing wrong? Is there a better way to do this? Somehow I feel I am not using 'tee' properly. Any insight would be appreciated.

I'm using bash shell, if this is relevant.

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    You're simply not waiting long enough; eventually the pipe buffer fills up and dipslays the output.
    – Jeff Schaller ♦
    Feb 1, 2016 at 19:22
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    see unix.stackexchange.com/questions/25372/…
    – Jeff Schaller ♦
    Feb 1, 2016 at 19:24
  • I thought I wasn't waiting long enough, but after a couple of minutes, I realized that that wasn't the problem. Thanks for the link though, it addresses the issue I am facing precisely. But, the solutions provided involve installing a new package. I was hoping for a more generic solution without installing external packages.
    – Aniruddha Deshpande
    Feb 1, 2016 at 19:42
  • My bad, the inbuilt stdbuf works perfectly.
    – Aniruddha Deshpande
    Feb 2, 2016 at 9:56

1 Answer 1

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Your pipe commands, as a non-terminal destination, are buffering your output. It will show up eventually, but only when quite a lot of output builds up or the ping command exits.

You can use ping -c 5 google.com to set a specific number of packets to be sent and then ping will exit. Your output comes back and the pipes should work as expected.

Edit: another workaround uses stdbuf to avoid pipe buffering and awk to avoid some internal cut buffering and lets the ping run continuously:

ping www.google.com | stdbuf --output=0 awk '{print $1}' | tee /tmp/file
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    You are correct, I tried it with count specified, and it did display the result on stdout and in the file. However, if I don't specify the count and kill the process by using Ctrl-C, would I still see the output? Or would all of it be lost because of the interrupt?
    – Aniruddha Deshpande
    Feb 1, 2016 at 19:48
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    If you hit ^C from the terminal, the interrupt signal would be sent to the last command you ran-- the tee so you would not get the output. Now you could be sneaky and find the PID of the ping command itself then use kill -INT <PID> and ONLY the ping command would stop and the output would be sent to cut and tee, letting you see it.
    – Steve Bonds
    Feb 1, 2016 at 19:53
  • Ah! Killing the long_running_process (ping) did the job. Thanks! However it does seem sort of a workaround. The link provided by @Jeff above describes the need to unbuffer the output. But the only built-in command stdbuf doesn't work with tee :/. Are there better ways to format and (print the output and write to file) ?
    – Aniruddha Deshpande
    Feb 1, 2016 at 20:22
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    On my linux test host, there seems to be something "special" about cut in particular. I tried the same test using awk '{print $1}' and the no-output problem went away. Perhaps cut is buffering things internally too? ping www.google.com | stdbuf --output=0 awk '{print $1}' | tee /tmp/file Note that the output to "file" will still be buffered.
    – Steve Bonds
    Feb 1, 2016 at 20:33
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    Thanks Steve, I think I wasn't using stdbuf correctly. Your solution works as expected. Interestingly, when I tried awk, my output was still buffered, it was displayed/written in chunks. However when I used cut it wasn't the case. The output was displayed line by line. So to me it seems that awk is buffering whereas for you it is the opposite. Strange I must say. Or maybe I'm missing something crucial..
    – Aniruddha Deshpande
    Feb 2, 2016 at 9:53

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