Of bash and streams and pipes - One Tee To Rule Them All

There is a great answer on stack overflow showing how to feed one output stream into multiple processes.  It is a little bit of a hack of the excellent tool tee, which I've been using for some time.  Normally, tee take stout and writes it to a file, while passing it along to stout.  This solution provided on s.o. shows how to hack this with the bash trick >(process)  -- so as far as tee knows, it is writing to 2 or more files, but the "files" are actually background processes.

This syntax is bash-dependent, so won't work in sh, and this will likely come up if you're using system() in, say,  perl.  There is another excellent answer on stack overflow on how to deal with this.

Side note:  Using the <(command) trick, my post from March 16 can now be written:

paste <(grep -v "#" hsa.gff | cut -f 1,4,5,9) <(grep -v "#" hsa.gff | cut -f 6,7) | sed s/^/chr/ >mirbase18.bed