Copy/Pasting output from the terminal

Manually copy-pasting the output of a terminal command with a mouse/trackpad feels tedious. It is more convenient to use commands to do so. And we can save the effort by using the built-in commands.

Mac

We can use pbcopy and pbpaste to copy and paste from the Mac terminal.

We can pipe the output of a command to copy its output to the clipboard. For example, to copy the current directory path, we can use

pwd | pbcopy

Or if we want to copy the contents of a file:

cat ~/Desktop/example.txt | pbcopy

Similarly, to paste the clipboard output in a file, we can use:

pbpaste > ~/Documents/example.txt

Windows

The commands to use on a Windows machine are clip and powershell get-clipboard.

For copying the standard output to the clipboard, we use the command line command:

<some command> | clip

For copying the current directory, we need to convert it into a command. Since  %cd% is the environment variable that stores that value, we can echo that value and pipe it into the clip command.

echo %cd% | clip

Similarly, for copying a file’s contents to the clipboard, we can use

cat example.txt | clip

To paste the clipboard into a file, we can use the powershell get-clipboard command

powershell get-clipboard > example.txt

Linux

For Linux machines, we can use the terminal commands xclip or xsel.

These need to be installed first:

sudo apt-get install xclip
sudo apt-get install xsel

Using xsel, the command for copying something is

xsel --clipboard --input

So, copy the current directory, we can use:

pwd | xsel --clipboard --input

And for copying the contents of a file to the clipboard:

cat example.txt | xsel --clipboard --input

And for pasting the clipboard contents in a file, we can use:

xsel --clipboard --output > example.txt

That is all there is to copy/pasting output from the terminal to the system clipboard. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.