In the context where I want to capture the stdout of a process in a file but still want to have this output displayed in the terminal I can choose between script and tee. In this context, are these tools essentially equivalent or is there a – possibly subtle – reason to prefer one over the other?
The programs script and tee are designed for different purposes:
script -- make typescript of terminal sessiontee -- pipe fittingImportant differences between script and tee are:
script transmits the exit status of the process it supervises, while tee, being a filter, does not even know about it.script captures stdin, stdout, stderr of the process it supervises while tee only catches the stream it filters.None of these differences are relevant in the given context.
I found script to be useful for making control sequences work when piping to tee:
script -q -c 'python -c "import pdb, sys; pdb.set_trace()"' /dev/null \
| tee -a /tmp/tmp.txt
With only the following, Ctrl-A would be displayed as ^A etc:
python -c "import pdb, sys; pdb.set_trace()" | tee -a /tmp/tmp.txt
This is a minimal example. I am using tee here to capture the output from a pytest test run, but sometimes there might be a debugger in there, and cursor keys etc should work then.