How can I pipe the output of a command into my clipboard and paste it back when using a terminal? For instance:
cat file | clipboard
To copy text into a clipboard, you need to use a command like $ echo "Hello World" | xclip - i . It stores the text into a clipboard. To paste the output, we need to use the $ xclip - o command, and it will copy the text from the clipboard and paste out the stored output Hello World on the screen.
To copy the command prompt output to the clipboard, use one of the methods. Using Keyboard: Press Ctrl + A to select all text, and press ENTER to copy it to the clipboard. Using the Edit menu: Right-click the Command Prompt title bar → Edit → Select All. Repeat the same, and this time, select Copy from the Edit menu.
the shortcut is Ctrl + Shift + S ; it allows the output to be saved as a text file, or as HTML including colors!
I always wanted to do this and found a nice and easy way of doing it. I wrote down the complete procedure just in case anyone else needs it.
First install a 16 kB program called xclip
:
sudo apt-get install xclip
You can then pipe the output into xclip
to be copied into the clipboard:
cat file | xclip
To paste the text you just copied, you shall use:
xclip -o
To simplify life, you can set up an alias in your .bashrc file as I did:
alias "c=xclip" alias "v=xclip -o"
To see how useful this is, imagine I want to open my current path in a new terminal window (there may be other ways of doing it like Ctrl+T on some systems, but this is just for illustration purposes):
Terminal 1: pwd | c Terminal 2: cd `v`
Notice the ` `
around v
. This executes v
as a command first and then substitutes it in-place for cd
to use.
Only copy the content to the X
clipboard
cat file | xclip
If you want to paste somewhere else other than a X
application, try this one:
cat file | xclip -selection clipboard
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