Using the clipboard from the Mac OS X Terminal

You can use the clipboard from the directly from the terminal application, Mac OS X gives you two commands:

pbcopy

pbpaste

Naturally pbcopy will copy something on the clipboard and pbpaste will paste something from the clipboard.

For example you might want to save the results of a search on the file system:

# find ./ -name "*.doc" | pbcopy

this command will find for all the .doc documents starting from the current directory and then it will put the result in the clipboard.

if you want to make a text file from the content of the clipboard you can issue the following command:

# pbpaste > pasted.txt

This command will create the file pasted.txt with the content of the clipboard.

For further information issue the following commands:

# man pbcopy

or

# man pbpaste

Gg1