up vote 30 down vote favorite
10

I'm coping file to xclip

cat file.txt | xclip

I'm pasting without problem with

xclip -o

When I want to paste it to Firefox with Ctrl+V it pastes old text (that shouldn't already be in the clipboard).

When I go back to terminal and run xclip -o it pastes the correct text.

Why is there a problem with pasting to Firefox?

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4  
Note that this is useless use of cat. You can also do xclip file.txt according to its man page, and in general you can also redirect input using <, e.g. $some_command < file.txt. – janmoesen Oct 13 '11 at 18:33
up vote 34 down vote accepted

X11 has several available clipboards. By default, xclip places data in the primary selection buffer. To paste it, you use middle-click.

If you want to use Ctrl+v, use xclip -selection clipboard. See man xclip for more information.

There is good information about the different clipboards on freedesktop.org.

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the command xclip -selection clipboard never ends and I don't have middle button (only touchpad) – xralf Oct 12 '11 at 16:09
    
My fault, now I understand. – xralf Oct 12 '11 at 16:12
2  
On a side note: I just noticed that xclip's option -f, -filter is a built in tee . It writes to the clipboard and to stdout at the same time. That could come in handy (for something). – Peter.O Oct 13 '11 at 7:34
up vote 8 down vote

Copy to your clipboard with: 

xclip -sel clip < ~/path/to/file.txt

and then paste CTRL + V wherever you wish to.

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up vote 1 down vote

Add this to to your ~/.bashrc

# now `cclip' can be used when you it to be available to `ctrl-[vxc]'
alias cclip='xclip -selection clipboard'

alternatively, run this:

echo 'alias cclip='"'"'xclip -profile clipboard'"'" >> ~/.bashrc
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