I sometimes use it to do parallel greps on large files: zcat large_file.gz | tee >(grep -F pattern1 > pattern1_results.txt) >(grep -F pattern2 > pattern2_res

I sometimes use it to do parallel greps on large files: zcat large_file.gz | tee >(grep -F pattern1 > pattern1_results.txt) >(grep -F pattern2 > pattern2_results.txt) > /dev/null If you stick _pv_ between zcat and tee you can even get nice info about the progress.