Copy Shell Output via the Command Line

By  on  
Oftentimes I'll want to copy the output of a shell command execution but can't get the whole output because it's larger than the terminal's buffer length, so I'll need to write to file for easy viewing, or I'll simply be annoyed that I have to click-hold-drag to copy the output.  Shouldn't there be an easier way?  There is:  pbcopy and clip.  Using pbcopy within the shell, the output of an execution can automatically be added to the copy queue (or clipboard):
# Copy the source of davidwalsh.name to the clipboard on Mac
curl davidwalsh.name | pbcopy

# Copy the source of davidwalsh.name to the clipboard on Windows
curl davidwalsh.name | clip
Piping pbcopy at the end of the command makes this magic possible.  So what do I look forward to using this for?  My colleague Luke showed me how he gets the commit hash from the master branch without needing to go to GitHub to get it:
alias ghash='git rev-parse HEAD && git rev-parse HEAD | pbcopy'
I look forward to using pbcopy more -- an excellent utility to allow me to avoid lame cursor click-hold-drag to get the output I want!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer

    Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Quick MooTools Slideshow with Preloading Images

    I've been creating a lot of slideshow posts lately. Why, you ask? Because they help me get chicks. A quick formula for you: The following code snippet will show you how to create a simple slideshow with MooTools; the script will also...

  • By
    CSS Tooltips

    We all know that you can make shapes with CSS and a single HTML element, as I've covered in my CSS Triangles and CSS Circles posts.  Triangles and circles are fairly simply though, so as CSS advances, we need to stretch the boundaries...

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    It may be silly to notice that this isn’t for Windows…

  2. Might be worth adding instructions using xcopy on Linux, and clip on Windows

  3. I am on Linux and I use http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/software/xsel/

    Use it like this:
    curl davidwalsh.name | xsel –clipboard –input

    You can also alias is so you can use pbcopy

    To do that add alias pbcopy=’xsel –clipboard –input’ to your ~/:bashrc

  4. suprsidr

    windows would be curl davidwalsh.name | clip
    assuming you had curl for windows installed ;)

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!