What's a simple method to dump pipe input to a

Question

I'm looking for a little shell script that will take anything piped into it, and dump it to a file.. for email debugging purposes. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Use Procmail. Procmail is your friend. Procmail is made for this sort of thing.

Answer 2

You're not alone in needing something similar... in fact, someone wanted that functionality decades ago and developed tee :-)

Of course, you can redirect stdout directly to a file in any shell using the > character:

echo "hello, world!" > the-file.txt

Answer 3

The unix command tee does this.

man tee

Answer 4

The standard unix tool tee can do this. It copies input to output, while also logging it to a file.

Answer 5

If exim or sendmail is what's writing into the pipe, then procmail is a good answer because it'll give you file locking/serialization and you can put it all in the same file.

If you just want to write into a file, then - tee > /tmp/log.$$ or - cat > /tmp/log.$$ might be good enough.

Answer 6

cat > FILENAME