Copy text to the clipboard from the OS/X terminal
Question
I am often having to copy and paste text from the terminal. Is there a way to redirect the output of a command into a shell variable or another command that would place the output in the clipboard?
Solution
Use pbcopy
and pbpaste
. Anything sent to pbcopy
goes into the clipboard. Running pbpaste
sends the contents of the clipboard to standard output and you can chain them just like all other commands.
You can find some example uses here: http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/05/manipulating-the-clipboard-from-the-command-line/
OTHER TIPS
pbcopy
and pbpaste
replace non-ASCII characters with question marks in some environments. It can be avoided by setting LC_CTYPE
to UTF-8
.
LC_CTYPE=UTF-8 pbpaste
You could also use osascript:
osascript -e 'on run {input}
set the clipboard to input
end' "ä"
osascript -e 'the clipboard as text'
Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow