Ever found yourself wanting to copy the output from a command to your clipboard without having to select it first? Or maybe copy the contents of a file, like a config file? In this short article we’re going to cover how to do that in Windows, MacOS and Linux with Powershell.

The powershell way

Powershell 7 has a built-in cross platform cmdlet for both getting and setting your clipboard.

PS> "Hello, World!" | Set-Clipboard
PS> Get-Clipboard
Hello, World!

or the shorter way

PS> "Hello, World!" | scb
PS> gcb
Hello, World!

Native commands

The built-in Powershell cmdlets are great, but just for fun, let’s explore some other older commands native to it’s platform.

Windows

In Windows we have a command called clip. We can either pass a file or pipe output to this command and it will copy it to our clipboard.

Piping

Now let’s say we want to fetch our public ip and copy it to clipboard we would do the following:

irm ifconfig.co/ip | clip

If you Ctrl+v in your text editor of choice you should see the output of the command (in this example; your public ip).

Copy file contents

Let’s say we want to share our Powershell profile settings, we could easily copy the contents:

copy $profile

MacOS

MacOS also comes with it’s own command for copying output to clipboard, which is pbcopy.

Using the same example as in Windows, it will look like this:

irm ifconfig.co/ip | pbcopy

Issuing cmd + v in a text editor should give you your public ip.

pbcopy does not support providing a file, like clip does, but we can easily achieve the same result by using catand pipe the output to pbcopy.

cat $profile | pbcopy

Linux

Similar for Linux, we have the xclip command which looks a lot like the Windows version, but unlike Windows and MacOS, xclip does not come pre-installed in most Linux distributions. Luckily its available from all the major package managers.

Ubuntu based systems

sudo apt install xclip

RHEL based systems

sudo yum install xclip

Arch based systems

sudo pacman install xclip

Piping

Again, using the same example as for Windows and MacOS, this will copy your public ip to your clipboard in Linux.

irm ifconfig.co/ip | xclip

Copy file contents

And like Windows version, xclip also supports providing a file to copy instead of having to use cat.

xclip $profile

Summary

As you see, this is nothing fancy, but can come in handy in several scenarios especially if you like to do most of your work in the terminal.