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Access Clipboard from Terminal on MacOS using pbcopy and pbpaste

· One min read

On MacOS

pbcopy and pbpaste are Cmd+C/V for ClipBoard.

They work by piping stuff into them.

To write to clipboard:

  • echo "Hello" | pbcopy
  • cat file.txt | pbcopy

To read from the clipboard:

  • pbpaste
  • pbpaste > file.txt

For Linux see xclip with xclip -selection clipboard and xclip -o -selection clipboard) (it is ugly, so use bash aliases.)