How can I split and re-join STDOUT from multiple processes?

Question

I am working on a pipeline that has a few branch points that subsequently merge-- they look something like this:

         command2
        /        \\
command1           


        

Answer 1

I believe your solution is good and it uses tee as documented. If you read manpage of tee, it says:

Copy standard input to each FILE, and also to standard output

Your files are process substitutions.

And the standard output is what you need to remove, because you don't want it, and that's what you did with redirecting it to /dev/null