Copy current command at bash prompt to clipboard

Question

I would like a quick keyboard command sequence to copy the current command at a bash prompt to the clipboard.

So that, for example, to copy the last bash command to the clipboard, I'd press up+[some command sequence] to copy it. Or, for example, to search for a command in bash hisory, I'd use ctrl+r, search, display it on the command prompt, and then [some command sequence] to copy it, etc.

My current solution is using bash pipes: Pipe to/from the clipboard

So, to copy the previous command to clipboard:

echo "!!" | pbcopy 

Which isn't too terrible, but what if the command to copy isn't the last command, etc.

What's the proper way to achieve what I'm trying to achieve here?

Answer 1

Taking @Lauri's post for inspiration, here's a solution using the bind command:

bind '"\C-]":"\C-e\C-u pbcopy <<"EOF"\n\C-y\nEOF\n"' 

ctrl-] then will copy whatever is on the current bash prompt to the clipboard.

To make it persistent, you can add the bind command as above to your ~/.bashrc, or you can strip off the outer quotes and remove the 'bind' part of the call and add the result to your ~/.inputrc.

Non-OS-X users will have to swap pbcopy out with the appropriate command, probably xclip.

A quoted heredoc was used instead of a an echo+pipe technique so that both single and double quotes in the command at the bash prompt are preserved. With this technique, for example, I was able to hit ctrl-], copy the actual bind command from the terminal prompt, and paste it here in the answer. So the heredoc technique handles all of the special characters in the bind command here.

Answer 2

You can use READLINE_LINE with bind -x in bash 4:

copyline() { printf %s "$READLINE_LINE"|pbcopy; } bind -x '"\C-xc":copyline' 

You can install bash 4 and make it the default login shell by running brew install bash;echo /usr/local/bin/bash|sudo tee -a /etc/shells;chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash.

I also use this function to copy the last command:

cl() { history -p '!!'|tr -d \\n|pbcopy; }