Bash – How to get the exit code of a process that’s piped to tee

As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

du -hs * | sort -h

If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

-h, --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)

See argument @ Bash FAQ entry #24: "I set variables in a loop. Why do they suddenly disappear after the loop terminates? Or, why can't I pipe data to read?" (most recently archived here).

Summary: This is only supported from bash 4.2 and up. You need to use different ways like command substitutions instead of a pipe if you are using bash.