Yes I should have done a bit more homework but shaming for asking a clarifying question is unreasonable. Those of you who have the downvote trigger-finger can and should do better.
The same principle works the other way too - when a comment doesn't contain much information, readers tend to interpret it according to whatever they personally find the most irritating, annoying, or hurtful, and then react to that. Our minds are not our best friends this way.
The (partial) solution to this is to include enough disambiguating information in your comment. For example if your comment had contained enough information to make clear that your question was genuinely curious rather than snarkily dismissive, I doubt it would have gotten downvoted.
It's hard to do that because generally our intention is so clear and transparent to ourselves that it doesn't occur to us to include it in the message. Unfortunately for all of us on the internet, however, intent doesn't communicate itself.
tee actually does sorta work for this sometimes, but it’s not guaranteed to wait until EOF. For example I tested with a 10 line file where I ran `sort -u file.txt | tee file.txt` and it worked fine. But I then tried a large json file `jq . large.json | tee large.json` and the file was truncated before jq finished reading it.