pbpaste & pbcopy in Mac OS X (or: Terminal + Clipboard = Fun!)

The OS X shell is very powerful, but some wonderfully useful commands are almost entirely unknown to the community at large. Two of these forgotten commands are pbcopy and pbpaste. Let's take a quick look at what they can do.

pbcopy

This command allows you to copy text from stdin into the clipboard1 buffer. Trivial example:

echo 'Hello World!' | pbcopy

"Hello World!" is now in your clipboard.

pbpaste

Pastes from your clipboard to stdout. Trivial example:

echo `pbpaste`

This will echo the contents of your clipboard. If you're following along you'll see "Hello World!".

https://langui.sh/2010/11/14/pbpaste-pbcopy-in-mac-os-x-or-terminal-clipboard-fun/