Capture stdout to a variable but still display it in the console

I have a bash script which calls several long-running processes. I want to capture the output of those calls into variables for processing reasons. However, because these are long running processes, I would like the output of the rsync calls to be displayed in the console in *real-time* and not after the fact. To this end, I have [found][1] a way of doing it but it relies on outputting the text to /dev/stderr. I feel that outputting to /dev/stderr is not a good way of doing things. VAR1=$(for i in {1..5}; do sleep 1; echo $i; done | tee /dev/stderr) VAR2=$(rsync -r -t --out-format='%n%L' --delete -s /path/source1/ /path/target1 | tee /dev/stderr) VAR3=$(rsync -r -t --out-format='%n%L' --delete -s /path/source2/ /path/target2 | tee /dev/stderr) In the example above, I am calling rsync a few times and I want to see the file names as they are processed, but in the end I still want the output in a variable because I will be parsing it later. Is there a 'cleaner' way of accomplishing this? If it makes a difference, I am using Ubuntu 12.04, bash 4.2.24. [1]: http://sebthom.de/158-bash-capturing-stderr-variable/