How do I capture bash output to the Mac OS X clipboard?

Question

Is it possible to capture bash output to the OS X clipboard?

Similar: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/96024/is-it-possible-to-send-the-contents-of-a-text-file-to-the-clipboard-from-the-comm and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1064762/is-there-an-environment-variable-that-contains-the-clipboard-contents — Dennis Williamson, Jan 10 '10 at 03:30

martin clayton · Accepted Answer · 2010-01-10T02:09:14.730

293

The pbcopy command does this.

For example, this puts the output from ls on the clipboard/pasteboard:

ls | pbcopy

And pbpaste does the reverse, writing to stdout from the clipboard:

pbpaste > ls.txt

You can use both together to filter content on the clipboard - here's a rot13:

pbpaste | tr 'a-zA-Z' 'n-za-mN-ZA-M' | pbcopy

edited Jan 10 '10 at 02:09

answered Nov 18 '09 at 01:50

martin clayton

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 17 '16 at 10:34

6

In case you want to capture error messages, this will work:

cmd 2>&1  | pbcopy

answered Sep 17 '16 at 10:34

qed

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 19 '15 at 03:20

2

You can do this using the pbcopy command:

pbcopy < ./path/to/file/or/output/stream

edited Feb 19 '15 at 03:20

PatJ

answered Feb 19 '15 at 02:08

Morgan Howell

3 Answers3