tee and some commands

[Tom H]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 6:51 AM, Oliver Marshall
<Oliver.Marshall at g2support.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone noticed that tee doesn’t seem to log the output from some commands to
> a log file?
>
> I am using tee in a script on the following line;
>
>     ncftpput -u $ftp_user -p $ftp_pass -R -m -v ftp.mydomain.local /
> $dest/\archives/$1/ | tee -a $out_file
>
> Instead of logging to a log file via tee it now outputs two copies of the
> FTP output to the console and nothing to the log file.
>
> Is there a way I can work around that or is it a limitation in the ncftpput
> command do you think?

What's $out_file and can the user calling tee write to it?