How to pipe text from command line to the clipboard
Solution 1
I don't believe so - Vista (or NT4) introduced the clip
tool, which would do your command as dir | clip
- but there's nothing on XP. If you're willing to use 3rd party applications, though, there's this, which works as above, except is called cb
, not clip.
Solution 2
For Windows and non-Windows, this post (dead link) used to say:
On Windows Vista or later, try:
echo hello | clip
On Linux, try:
echo hello | xclip
On Mac OS X, try:
echo hello | pbcopy
For example, you might do
(cat myFile.txt | xclip)
. This would basically allow you to edit the clipboard directly.
(I came here via Google looking for the Mac equivalent of xclip
)
Similarly for contents of files (as you don't cat
on windows):
type filename | clip % OR clip < filename %windows cat filename | xclip # OR xclip < filename # X11 / Unix / Linux cat filename | pbcopy # OR pbcopy < filename # MacOS X
Solution 3
I looked into this for myself earlier today. Below is something helpful to those wanting to insert and retrieve information from the clipboard in a linux distribution. Below that is something that could prove helpful for those with windows.
Linux
By default, xclip uses the "primary" clipboard, which is what you have copied with your mouse. To get it to use the manual copy clipboard, use xclip -sel clip instead.
comment #3 here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=413786
Windows
The functionality is available in Active Perl distribution also, which is what I wound up using on the windows box in this exercise; The windows clip.exe didn't appear to allow for reading the data from the clipboard (only writing into clipboard).
http://www.xav.com/perl/site/lib/Win32/Clipboard.html
Solution 4
There's no standard way, but you can apparently use clip.exe
which came with the Windows Server 2003 resource kit . Source
The problem now becomes getting hold of a legal copy of this.
Solution 5
Windows users can get gclip.exe
as part of a big bundle of tools, which allows you to do just this.
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Tung
Updated on September 17, 2022Comments
-
Tung over 1 year
I'd like to do something like
dir *.* > clipboard
ie. get to get the standard output of a command line program copied to the clipboard. Can this be done on a standard XP machine without additional programs?
-
Arjan over 14 yearsJust for the archives: the Mac OS X equivalents are called
pbcopy
andpbpaste
. -
barlop over 10 yearssuperuser.com/questions/231023/… mentions petri.co.il/software/clip.zip which is apparently on windows server 2003 or the 2003 resource kit maybe. But there it is for download
-
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UNK over 14 yearsI wonder how legal that is. What sort of licensing do MS put their small cli tools under, I wonder?
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Arjan over 14 yearsAs an aside: see "Clip.exe Not Compatible with Notepad" at support.microsoft.com/kb/172596
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Mark over 14 yearsThat link isn't relevant to PowerShell. I've tested it and everything works fine with Notepad.
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quack quixote over 14 yearsas a historical note, Arjan's link to the MS support note references NT4. but you're probably right that consumer versions of Windows didn't include clip.exe before Vista.
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TheModularMind over 14 yearsIt was also available in the NT 4 and Server 2000 Resource kit if you have either of those available to you. It does not seem to be available in the now free-to-download subset of the 2000 RK tools.
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UNK over 14 yearsOh, fair enough. Never really get a chance to mess around on business machines! :(
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quack quixote over 14 yearsif it's any consolation, i completely missed out on all the fun of Windows NT 3.51. and i wasn't a fan of NT at all until i got to play with 2000 for a while.
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weakish over 11 yearsSince you've mentioned perl, I would like to add that ruby and python provide similar library too.
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eebbesen over 9 yearsThe link above is now throwing a 500. For those of you unfamiliar with
pbcopy
, <kbd>Command</kbd>+<kbd>V</kbd> doesn't paste: you need to type (or alias to something shorter)pbpaste
. -
phuclv over 8 yearsclip is just an external tool so it'll work in any consoles, not only powershell
-
DavidPostill over 7 yearsWelcome to Super User! Please read the question again carefully. Your answer does not answer the original question.
clip
does not exist on Windows XP. -
SK23 over 2 yearsIn WSL, you can access the
clip
of Windows by writingclip.exe
.