Pipes and redirection are two of the most powerful functions in Linux, and I love them.

However, I'm stuck with a situation where I need to write a fixed piece of text to a file without using a pipe, redirection or a function.

I'm using Bash in case that makes a difference.

First: Why?

I'll explain why, in case there's a simpler solution.

I have a background yad notification with some menu entries. In some of the menu entries, I want the notification to write a fixed piece of text to a file. Here's an example of what I mean.

yad --notification --command=quit --menu='Example!echo sample >text'

The problem is that yad doesn't accept redirection, so it literally prints the string sample >text instead of redirecting.

Likewise, the pipe symbol (|) is a separator in yad; but if you change that, yad takes it as a literal character. For example:

yad --notification --command=quit --separator='#' --menu='Example!echo sample | tee text'

This literally prints the string sample | tee text instead of piping.

There's also no point in writing a function for yad to call, because yad runs in its own space and doesn't recognise the function.

Hence my question

Thus, I want a command like echo, cat or printf that takes an output file as an argument rather than a redirect. I have searched for such a command but cannot find it.

I can, of course, write my own and put it in the default path:

FILENAME="${1}"
shift
printf '%s\n' "${*}" >"${FILENAME}"

But, I'll be surprised indeed if Linux doesn't already have something like this!

Thank you

Pipes and redirection are two of the most powerful functions in Linux, and I love them.

However, I'm stuck with a situation where I need to write a fixed piece of text to a file without using a pipe, redirection or a function.

I'm using Bash in case that makes a difference.

First: Why?

I'll explain why, in case there's a simpler solution.

I have a background yad notification with some menu entries. In some of the menu entries, I want the notification to write a fixed piece of text to a file. Here's an example of what I mean.

yad --notification --command=quit --menu='Example!echo sample >text.txt'

The problem is that yad doesn't accept redirection, so it literally prints the string sample >text.txt instead of redirecting.

Likewise, the pipe symbol (|) is a separator in yad; but if you change that, yad takes it as a literal character. For example:

yad --notification --command=quit --separator='#' --menu='Example!echo sample | tee text.txt'

This literally prints the string sample | tee text.txt instead of piping.

There's also no point in writing a function for yad to call, because yad runs in its own space and doesn't recognise the function.

Hence my question

Thus, I want a command like echo, cat or printf that takes an output file as an argument rather than a redirect. I have searched for such a command but cannot find it.

I can, of course, write my own and put it in the default path:

FILENAME="${1}"
shift
printf '%s\n' "${*}" >"${FILENAME}"

and then

yad --notification --command=quit --menu='Example!myscript text.txt sample'

But, I'll be surprised indeed if Linux doesn't already have something like this!

Thank you