Can someone explain why this would make the command wait forever? What is tee waiting for?

echo "test" | sudo tee newfile

What would be a scriptable workaround for such cases?

Edit: this command would not terminate in zsh. This works fine in bash tho.

  • hallettj
    English
    1·
    4 hours ago

    I’m gonna take a couple of stabs in the dark.

    According to this Stack Overflow answer using tee can prevent the prompt from drawing which makes it appear that a script has not terminated. The answerer’s workaround is to put a very short sleep command after the tee command.

    If this is what happened to you maybe the reason the script works in bash but not in zsh is because you have different prompts configured in those two shells.

    Another idea is to replace tee with sponge from moreutils. The difference is that sponge waits for the end of stdin before it starts writing which can avoid problems in some situations.