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Is there functionality in unix that allows for the following:

echo "Some Text" | copy-to-clipboard
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you must mean stdout? – phunehehe Nov 10 '10 at 0:36
1  
it really depends on which side of the pipe your standing on :P to the command that sends it to the clipboard, its stdin. – Stefan Nov 10 '10 at 4:53
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People who have used Unix for a long time will tell you it's better to write <longTextFile straightToClipboard. It's the same as cat longTextFile straightToClipboard, but doesn't require running cat. Just an observation. Feel free to ignore it. See The Useless Use of Cat Award for some background and examples if you're interested. – Mikel Apr 5 '11 at 10:23

3 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

There are a couple tools capable of writing to the clipboard; I use xsel. It takes flags to write to the primary X selection (-p), secondary selection (-s), or clipboard (-b). Passing it -i will tell it to read from stdin, so you want:

$ echo "Some Text" | xsel -i -b
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Another one is xclip; it accepts from stdin by default. I only use it because it's the first such tool that I learned of. – Shawn J. Goff Nov 9 '10 at 19:04
@Shawn Post it as a separate answer :) – Michael Mrozek♦ Nov 9 '10 at 19:35
up vote 6 down vote

you can use xsel

xsel < file
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The question is: Which clipboard? Linux X server has 3 (generally, only 2 are used)... xsel uses the PRIMARY clipboard by default.. The PRIMARY clipboard kicks in automatically every time you simply select soemthing. You paste if by pressing the center mouse button.. The Ctrl+C / Crtr+V type clipboard is called the CLIPBOARD clipboard :).. so if you want to use the Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V clipboard with 'xsel', the command is: xsel -ib <file-long-or-short ("Look ma, no cat!" :) ... or if you like <file-long-or-short xsel -ib .. -i is default. -b is for the Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V type of clipBoard – Peter.O Apr 5 '11 at 11:42
gnome-terminal. Edited. @jamespo - this doesn't seem to work. – ripper234 Apr 5 '11 at 12:26
works for me on gnome-terminal in ubuntu 10.04 using the xsel in the repo (paste with middle button) – jamespo Apr 5 '11 at 15:42
up vote 0 down vote

On Mac OS X there are the lovely pbcopy and pbpaste commands which are very helpful :)

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