xvtk
xvtk

Reputation: 1070

Copy text to the clipboard from the OS/X terminal

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?

Upvotes: 9

Views: 11165

Answers (2)

Lri
Lri

Reputation: 27633

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'

Upvotes: 4

Qsario
Qsario

Reputation: 1026

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/

Upvotes: 21

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