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Brainiarc7/xclip-copy-to-clipboard.md

Created April 26, 2017 17:53
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Using xclip to copy terminal content to the clip board on Linux
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xclip-copy-to-clipboard.md

Using xclip to copy terminal content to the clip board:

Say you want to pipe shell output to your clipboard on Linux. How would you do it? First, choose the clipboard destination, either the Mouse clip or the system clipboard.

For the mouse clipboard, pipe straight to xclip:

echo 123 | xclip

For the system clip board, pipe to xclip and select clip directly:

echo 123 | xclip -sel clip

See the man file of xclip here.

@richarddewit
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richarddewit commented Jan 14, 2019 •
edited

The exact parameters for xclip don't really matter, as long as they unambiguously resemble -selection and clipboard, so xclip -sel clip or xclip -se c can all be used, but not xclip -s clipb as -s also resembles -silent.
So the shortest possible command is xclip -se c.

From the manual:

Options can be abbreviated as long as they remain unambiguous. For example, it is possible to use -d or -disp instead of -display. However, -v couldn't be used because it is ambiguous (it could be short for -verbose or -version), so it would be interpreted as a filename.

Note that only the first character of the selection specified with the -selection option is important. This means that "p", "sec" and "clip" would have the same effect as using "primary", "secondary" or "clipboard" respectively.

@aminelch
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thank you
i use it as a alia on my zh terminal
alias ccc="xclip -sel clip"

@willsilvano
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Thanks! @aminelch

@dreua
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dreua commented May 25, 2021

Thanks, just added alias xcli-actual-clipboard='xclip -sel clip' as a reminder & shortcut for future me.

@Brainiarc7
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Brainiarc7 commented May 25, 2021 via email

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