Writing to a file without using a file system library using Command Line

tee unix command

Manytimes you want to write things to a file programmatically. That means, you write a code so as to fill the file. This involves importing the file system library in the respective language and using it. For example python and JS both use fs library. But there is a simpler way for super lazy people !

The idea is to just use the print the output and write the ouput to a file. For example you want to write, 1 to 10 numbers in a file. Write a simple python code for that

for i in range(1,11):
  print(i)

Now when you run python FILENAME.py it prints the numbers 1 to 10 on the terminal. Now we will use the tee command to write it to a another file

python FILENAME.py | tee ONE_TO_TEN.txt

There will be a file by name ONE_TO_TEN.txt created with content of numbers from 1 to 10. Learn more about tee command from here

Why did I write a blog about such a small thing? I got excited after knowing about such useful and awesome linux command. There have been situations in the past where I wanted to save the output of a command in some file. But never knew a proper way to do it :(