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

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 > /dev/clip  # Dump the contents of "foo" into the clipboard

On Windows (with Cygwin) try cat /dev/clipboard or echo "foo" > /dev/clipboard as mentioned in this article.

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
 _____________
< Hello World >
 -------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Running it by itself will simply output what's in the clipboard.

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.

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 > command, since that will not work.

For Mac only:

echo "Hello World" | pbcopy
pbpaste

These are located /usr/bin/pbcopy and /usr/bin/pbpaste.

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 & 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 > /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 & Copy clicks.

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();

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 &> /dev/null
            then
                    xclip -out -selection clipboard
            elif command -v xsel
            then
                    xsel --clipboard --output
            else
                    print "clipcopy: Platform $OSTYPE not supported or xclip/xsel not installed" >&2
                    return 1
            fi
    fi
}

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.

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

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>&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 >$tmp
cat $tmp
# comment out for debugging
rm $tmp

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="http://foo-software.com/repository/foo/debian/ubuntu/xenial/164914519191464/sources.txt"
$ $(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 (+)
"+p     ; select (") the CLIPBOARD selection (+) and paste/put it
ggVG"+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.

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 < 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.

just searched the same stuff on my KDE environment. Feel free to use clipcopy and clippaste

KDE:

> echo "TEST CLIP FROM TERMINAL" | clipcopy 
> clippaste 
TEST CLIP FROM TERMINAL

There is also xclip-copyfile.

pbcopy is built in OSX:

Copying the content of .bash_profile:

cat ~/.bash_profile | pbcopy

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 >(xclip -i -selection clipboard)

>() 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] )) && {
    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 && is a binary AND, if a then b, hence if you have xclip then the aliases will be set.

echo "another test" | tee >(pbcopy)

To get your clipboard content just type:

pbpaste | "any-command-you-need-here"

  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.

In Linux this works:

cat filename | xclip

Make sure you are using alias xclip="xclip -selection c" or else you won't be able to paste using Ctrl+v.

Example: After running echo -n test | xclip, Ctrl+v will paste test

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 > file

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

In macOS, use pbpaste.

For example:

Update the clipboard

pbpaste  | ruby -ne ' puts "\|" + $_.split( )[1..4].join("\|") ' | pbcopy

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!" > ~/clip
$ echo `cat ~/clip`
Hello, World!

Try

xclip

xclip - command line interface to X selections (clipboard) 

man

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

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

1. Escape single quotes in the text you want to paste: replace all occurrences of ' with '\'' and copy the result to clipboard.
2. Type echo -n '
3. Press Shift+Insert
4. Type ' > filename.txt
5. 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.

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

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)

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.