This example shows tee being used to bypass an inherent limitation in the sudo command sudo is unable to pipe the standard output to a file By dumping its stdout stream into devnull we also suppress the mirrored output in the console hm sudo isnt unable to  to a file its just that bash or whatever you use interprets the  and it doesnt get passed on to sudo some command  sudo sh c cat  rootownedfile is equivalent to some command  sudo tee rootownedfile devnull for example