1. [n]  a short peg put into the ground to hold a golf ball off the ground
2. [n]  support holding a football on end and above the ground preparatory to the kickoff
3. [n]  the starting place for each hole on a golf course; "they were waiting on the first tee"
4. [v]  connect with a tee, as of pipes
5. [v]  place on a tee; "tee golf balls"

1. \Tee\, n.
   The letter T, t; also, something shaped like, or resembling
   in form, the letter T.
   

2. \Tee\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Teed}; p. pr. & vb. n.
   {Teeing}.] (Golf)
   To place (the ball) on a tee.
   

3. \Tee\, n. [Cf. Icel. tj[=a] to show, mark.]
   (a) The mark aimed at in curling and in quoits.
   (b) The nodule of earth
   

4. \Tee\, n.
   A short piece of pipe having a lateral outlet, used to
   connect a line of pipe with a pipe at a right angle with the
   line; -- so called because it resembles the letter {T} in
   shape.
   

A Unix command which copies its standard input to its standard output (like cat) but also to a file given as its argument. tee is thus useful in pipelines of Unix commands (see plumbing) where it allows you to create a duplicate copy of the data stream. E.g.

        egrep Unix Dictionary | tee /dev/tty | wc -l

searches for lines containing the string "Unix" in the file "Dictionary", prints them to the terminal (/dev/tty) and counts them.

Unix manual page: tee(1).

[Jargon File]