Bash
(Much of this also works in ZSH)
Scripting
Traps
You can add handling for exceptional cases (signals) as well as errors and exit.
trap "{echo ERR}" SIGINT SIGTERM ERR EXIT
Signals are fairly self-explanatory, EXIT is triggered on a normal exit (code 0), and ERR is triggered on a non-zero exit.
Duplicating data without files on disk
Sometimes you want to use the output of a command and a bash variable is not suitable (e.g., might contain special characters, etc.)
TESTD=$(mktemp -d)
mkfifo -m 0700 ${TESTD}/f1
mkfifo -m 0700 ${TESTD}/f2
(cat ${TESTD}/f1; cat ${TESTD}/f2) &
SOMECOMMAND | tee ${TESTD}/f1 | tee ${TESTD}/f2 >/dev/null