Clipboard — Copy & Paste

Read from and write to the system clipboard. Built into macOS, no install needed.

Commands

# Read clipboard contents
pbpaste

# Copy text to clipboard
echo "hello world" | pbcopy

# Copy file contents to clipboard
pbcopy < /path/to/file.txt

# Save clipboard to file
pbpaste > /path/to/output.txt

# Copy command output to clipboard
ls -la | pbcopy
date | pbcopy

# Transform clipboard content
pbpaste | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' | pbcopy    # uppercase
pbpaste | sort | pbcopy                            # sort lines
pbpaste | wc -w                                    # word count

# Copy with no trailing newline
printf "%s" "exact text" | pbcopy

Linux Equivalents

# If on Linux, use xclip or xsel
xclip -selection clipboard           # copy (pipe into)
xclip -selection clipboard -o        # paste

Guidelines

• When the user says "copy this" or "put this in my clipboard", use pbcopy
• When the user says "what's in my clipboard?" or "paste", use pbpaste
• For transformations, pipe pbpaste through the transform and back to pbcopy
• Always confirm what was copied with a brief summary
• Never display clipboard contents unless asked — they may contain sensitive data