Pipe to from the clipboard in Bash script

Question

Is it possible to pipe to from the clipboard in Bash   Whether it is piping to from a device handle or using an auxiliary application  I can t find anything   For example  if  dev clip was a device linking to the clipboard we could do   cat  dev clip          Dump the contents of the clipboard cat foo  gt   dev clip    Dump the contents of  foo  into the clipboard

User · Answer

A way to paste from clipboard to file without any tools except echo.

Escape single quotes in the text you want to paste: replace all occurrences of ' with '\'' and copy the result to clipboard.
Type echo -n '
Press Shift+Insert
Type ' > filename.txt
Press Enter

Basically you're doing this:

echo -n 'copied text with single quotes escaped' > filename.txt

It works even if the copied text has new lines.

User · Answer

I have found a good reference  https   unix stackexchange com questions 69111   In my case I would like to paste content on the clipboard and also to see what is been pasted there  so I used also the tee command with a file descriptor   echo  just a test    tee  gt  xclip -i -selection clipboard     gt    is a form of process substitution  bash replaces each with the path to a file descriptor which is connected to the standard input of the program within the parentheses   The teecommand forks your command allowing you to  pipe its content  and see the result on standard output  stdout    you can also create aliases to get and write on the clipboard  allowing you to use  pbcopy  and  pbpaste  as if you where on MAC  In my case  as I use zsh I have this on my aliases file        commands xclip      amp  amp        alias pbpaste  xclip -i -selection clipboard -o      alias pbcopy  xclip -selection clipboard      the      command name     in zsh tests if the command  name  is installed on your system  then both aliases are grouped with     the  amp  amp  is a binary AND  if a then b  hence if you have xclip then the aliases will be set   echo  another test    tee  gt  pbcopy    To get your clipboard content just type   pbpaste    any-command-you-need-here

User · Answer

pbcopy is built in OSX   Copying the content of  bash profile   cat    bash profile   pbcopy

User · Answer

There are a couple ways  Some of the ways that have been mentioned include  I think  tmux  screen  vim  emacs  and the shell  I don t know emacs or screen  so I ll go over the other three  Tmux While not an X selection  tmux has a copy mode accessible via prefix-   prefix is Ctrl B by default   The buffer used for this mode is separate and exclusive to tmux  which opens up quite a few possibilities and makes it more versatile than the X selections in the right situations  To exit this mode  hit q  to navigate  use your vim or emacs binding  default   vim   so hjkl for movement  v V C-v for character line block selection  etc  When you have your selection  hit Enter to copy and exit the mode  To paste from this buffer  use prefix-   Shell Any installation of X11 seems to come with two programs by default  xclip and xsel  kinda like how it also comes with both startx and xinit   Most of the other answers mention xclip  and I really like xsel for its brevity  so I m going to cover xsel  From xsel 1x    Input options -a  --append append standard input to the selection  Implies -i  -f  --follow append to selection as standard input grows  Implies -i  -i  --input read standard input into the selection  Output options -o  --output write the selection to standard output  Action options -c  --clear clear the selection  Overrides all input options  -d  --delete Request that the current selection be deleted  This not only clears the selection  but also requests to the program in which the selection resides that the selected contents be deleted  Overrides all input options  Selection options -p  --primary operate on the PRIMARY selection  default   -s  --secondary operate on the SECONDARY selection  -b  --clipboard operate on the CLIPBOARD selection   And that s about all you need to know  p  or nothing  for PRIMARY  s for SECONDARY  b for CLIPBOARD  o for output  Example  say I want to copy the output of foo from a TTY and paste it to a webpage for a bug report  To do this  it would be ideal to copy to from the TTY X session  So the question becomes how do I access the clipboard from the TTY  For this example  we ll assume the X session is on display  1    foo -v Error  not a real TTY details  blah blah   0x0000000040abeaf4 blah blah   0x0000000040abeaf8 blah blah   0x0000000040abeafc blah blah   0x0000000040abeb00       foo -v   DISPLAY  1 xsel -b   copies it into clipboard of display  1  Then I can Ctrl-V it into the form as per usual  Now say that someone on the support site gives me a command to run to fix the problem  It s complicated and long    DISPLAY  1 xsel -bo sudo foo --update --clear-cache --source-list  quot http   foo-software com repository foo debian ubuntu xenial 164914519191464 sources txt quot      DISPLAY  1 xsel -bo  Password for braden  UPDATING                         100 00  Clearing cache    Fetching sources    Reticulating splines    Watering trees    Climbing mountains    Looking advanced    Done    foo Thank you for your order  A pizza should arrive at your house in the next 20 minutes  Your total is  6 99  Pizza ordering seems like a productive use of the command line     moving on  Vim If compiled with  clipboard  This is important  Check your vim --version   Vim should have access to the X PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections  The two selections are accessible from the   and   registers  respectively  and may be written to and read from at your leisure the same as any other register  For example    y       copy yank  y  everything     into the CLIPBOARD selection      quot  p       select   quot   the CLIPBOARD selection     and paste put it ggVG quot  y   Alternative version of the first example  If your copy of vim doesn t directly support access to X selections  though  it s not the end of the world  You can just use the xsel technique as described in the last section   r   xsel -bo   read   r  from the stdout of      xsel -bo   w   xsel -b    write  w  to the stdin of         xsel -b   Bind a couple key combos and you should be good

User · Answer

xsel -b   Does the job for X Window  and it is mostly already installed  A look in the man page of xsel is worth the effort

User · Answer

Install    You can install xclip using  apt-get  apt-get install xclip    or  pacman  pacman -S xclip    or  dnf  dnf install xclip   If you do not have access to apt-get nor pacman  nor dnf  the sources are available on sourceforge   Set-up  Bash  In    bash aliases  add   alias setclip  xclip -selection c  alias getclip  xclip -selection c -o    Do not forget to load your new configuration using      bash aliases or by restarting your profile   Fish  In    config fish config fish  add   abbr setclip  xclip -selection c  abbr getclip  xclip -selection c -o    Do not forget to restart your fish instance by restarting your terminal for changes to apply   Usage  You can now use setclip and getclip  e g     echo foo   setclip   getclip foo

User · Answer

Make sure you are using alias xclip  quot xclip -selection c quot  or else you won t be able to paste using Ctrl v  Example  After running echo -n test   xclip  Ctrl v will paste test

User · Answer

For Mac only   echo  Hello World    pbcopy pbpaste   These are located  usr bin pbcopy and  usr bin pbpaste

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Copy and paste to clipboard in Windows  Cygwin    See     clip exe -   CLIP Description      Redirects output of command line tools to the Windows clipboard      This text output can then be pasted into other programs  Parameter List                      Displays this help message  Examples  DIR   CLIP          Places a copy of the current directory                         listing into the Windows clipboard  CLIP  lt  README TXT   Places a copy of the text from readme txt                         on to the Windows clipboard    Also getclip  it can be used instead of Shift   Ins   and putclip  echo oaeuoa   putclip exe to put it into clip  exist

User · Answer

From this thread  there is an option which does not require installing any gclip xclip xsel third-party software   A perl script  since perl is usually always installed   use Win32  Clipboard  print Win32  Clipboard  GetText

User · Answer

On macOS use the built in pbcopy and pbpaste commands   For example  if you run  cat    bashrc   pbcopy   the contents of the    bashrc file will be available for pasting with the Cmd v shortcut

User · Answer

Wow  I can t believe how many answers there are for this question  I can t say I ve tried them all but I ve tried the top 3 or 4 and none of them work for me  What did work for me was an answer located in one of the comment written by a user called doug  Since I found it so helpful  I decided to restate in an answer    Install xcopy utility and when you re in the Terminal  input   Copy  Thing you want to copy xclip -selection c   Paste  myvariable   xclip -selection clipboard -o    I noticed alot of answers recommended pbpaste and pbcopy  If you re into those utilities but for some reason they are not available on your repo  you can always make an alias for the xcopy commands and call them pbpaste and pbcopy   alias pbcopy  xclip -selection c   alias pbpaste  xclip -selection clipboard -o     So then it would look like this   Thing you want to copy pbcopy myvariable   pbpaste

User · Answer

There s a wealth of clipboards you could be dealing with   I expect you re probably a Linux user who wants to put stuff in the X Windows primary clipboard   Usually  the clipboard you want to talk to has a utility that lets you talk to it   In the case of X  there s xclip  and others   xclip -selection c will send data to the clipboard that works with Ctrl   C  Ctrl   V in most applications   If you re on Mac OS X  there s pbcopy  e g cat example txt   pbcopy  If you re in Linux terminal mode  no X  then look into gpm or screen which has a clipboard   Try the screen command readreg   Under Windows 10  or cygwin  use  dev clipboard or clip

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Here is a ready to use bash script for reading the clipboard which works on multiple platforms  Please edit the script here if you add functionality  e g  more platforms       bin bash   WF 2013-10-04   multi platform clipboard read access   supports     Mac OS X     git shell   Cygwin  Windows      Linux  e g  Ubuntu       display an error   error       echo  error   1  1 gt  amp 2   exit 1        getClipboard   function getClipboard      os  uname        case  os in            git bash   Windows          MINGW32 NT-6 1            cat  dev clipboard             Mac OS X         Darwin             pbpaste               Linux          Linux               works only for X clipboard - a check that X is running might be due           xclip -o                        error  unsupported os  os          esac    tmp  tmp clipboard   getClipboard  gt  tmp cat  tmp   comment out for debugging rm  tmp

User · Answer

On Windows  with Cygwin  try cat  dev clipboard or echo  quot foo quot   gt   dev clipboard as mentioned in this article

User · Answer

A few Windows programs I wrote years ago  They allow you dump  push  append and print the clipboard  It works like this   dumpclip   perl -pe  s monkey chimp g     pushclip   It includes source code  cmd clip zip

User · Answer

This function will test what clipboard exists and use it  To verify copy past into your shell then call the function clippaste  clippaste          if     OSTYPE    darwin         then             pbpaste     elif     OSTYPE    cygwin         then             cat  dev clipboard     else             if command -v xclip  amp  gt   dev null             then                     xclip -out -selection clipboard             elif command -v xsel             then                     xsel --clipboard --output             else                     print  quot clipcopy  Platform  OSTYPE not supported or xclip xsel not installed quot   gt  amp 2                     return 1             fi     fi

User · Answer

If you re like me and run on a Linux server without root privileges and there isn t any xclip or GPM you could workaround this issue by just using a temporary file  For example     echo  Hello  World    gt    clip   echo  cat   clip  Hello  World

User · Answer

The ruby oneliner inspired me to try with python   Say we want a command that indents whatever is in the clipboard with 4 spaces  Perfect for sharing snippets on stackoverflow     pbpaste   python -c  import sys  for line in sys stdin     print f      line       pbcopy   that s not a typo  Python needs newlines to do a for loop  We want to alter the lines in one pass to avoid building up an extra array in memory   If you don t mind building the extra array try     pbpaste   python -c  import sys  print    join  f      l   for l in sys stdin       pbcopy   but honestly awk is better for this than python  I defined this alias in my    bashrc file  alias indent  pbpaste   awk   print           0     pbcopy    now when I run indent whatever is in my clipboard is indented

User · Answer

In Linux this works   cat filename   xclip

User · Answer

There is also xclip-copyfile

User · Answer

This is a simple Python script that does just what you need      usr bin python  import sys    Clipboard storage clipboard file     tmp clipboard tmp   if sys stdin isatty       Should write clipboard contents out to stdout     with open clipboard file   r   as c          sys stdout write c read    elif sys stdout isatty       Should save stdin to clipboard     with open clipboard file   w   as c          c write sys stdin read      Save this as an executable somewhere in your path  I saved it to  usr local bin clip  You can pipe in stuff to be saved to your clipboard     echo  Hello World    clip   And you can pipe what s in your clipboard to some other program     clip   cowsay                 lt  Hello World  gt   -------------                               oo                                                         ----w                               Running it by itself will simply output what s in the clipboard

User · Answer

On the Windows subsystem for Linux you can copy to the clipboard with clip exe   cat file   clip exe   Keep in mind to use the   pipe command  And not a  gt  command  since that will not work

User · Answer

2018 answer Use clipboard-cli  It works with macOS  Windows  Linux  OpenBSD  FreeBSD  and Android without any real issues  Install it with  npm install -g clipboard-cli  Then you can do  echo foo   clipboard   If you want  you can alias to cb by putting the following in your  bashrc   bash profile  or  zshrc  alias cb clipboard

User · Answer

on Wayland xcopy doesn t seem to work  use wl-clipboard instead  e g  on fedora  sudo dnf install wl-clipboard  tree   wl-copy  wl-paste  gt  file

User · Answer

There are different clipboards in Linux  the X server has one  the window manager might have another one  etc  There is no standard device   Oh  yes  on CLI  the screen program has its own clipboard as well  as do some other applications like Emacs and vi   In X  you can use xclip   You can check this thread for other possible answers  http   unix derkeiler com Newsgroups comp unix shell 2004-07 0919 html

User · Answer

Try  xclip  xclip - command line interface to X selections  clipboard     man

User · Answer

In macOS  use pbpaste   For example   Update the clipboard   pbpaste    ruby -ne   puts           split    1  4  join           pbcopy

User · Answer

Although  1 year later  I share a slightly different solution  Hope this is useful for somebody   Yesterday I found myself with the question   How to share the clipboard between different user sessions    When switching between sessions with ctrlaltF7 - ctrlaltF8  in fact  you can t paste what you copied   I came up with the following quick  amp  dirty solution  based on a named pipe  It is surely quite bare and raw  but I found it functional   user1 host    mkfifo  tmp sharedClip   then in the sending terminal  user1 host    cat  gt   tmp sharedClip   last  in the receiving terminal   user2 host    cat  tmp sharedClip   Now  you type or paste anything in the first terminal  and  after hitting return   it will appear immediately in the receiving terminal  from where you can Copy Paste again anywhere you like   Of course this doesn t just strictly take the content from user1 s clipboard to make it available in user2 s clipboard  but rather it requires an additional pair of Paste  amp  Copy clicks

User · Answer

just searched the same stuff on my KDE environment  Feel free to use clipcopy and clippaste KDE   gt  echo  quot TEST CLIP FROM TERMINAL quot    clipcopy   gt  clippaste  TEST CLIP FROM TERMINAL

User · Answer

xsel on Debian Ubuntu Mint    append to clipboard  cat  the file with content    xsel -ib    or type in the happy face    and     echo  the happy face    and content    xsel -ib    show clipboard xsel -b    Get more info  man xsel   Install  sudo apt-get install xsel

[linux] Pipe to/from the clipboard in Bash script

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