command pipe into subshell
The first notation is the process substitution of Bash 4.x (not in 3.x, or not all versions of 3.x).
As far as tee
is concerned, it is given a file name (such as /dev/fd/64
) to which it writes as well as to standard output; it is actually a file descriptor for the write end of a pipe. As far as wc
is concerned, it reads its standard input (which is the read end of the pipe that is connected to /dev/fd/64
for tee
), and writes its answer to the standard output of the shell invoking the pipeline (not the standard output of tee
which goes down the pipeline).