How to Copy File Content to Clipboard on Linux
On Linux, the command line interface is a powerful tool that can be used to perform a wide variety of tasks. One such task is copying the contents of a file to the clipboard. This can be particularly useful when working with large amounts of data or when you need to transfer data between different applications. In this how-to guide, we will explore how to copy the contents of a file to the clipboard from the command line on Linux.
Using xclip
xclip is a command-line utility for copying and pasting text between the clipboard and the terminal. It is commonly used on Linux and Unix-like operating systems to copy text from the terminal to the clipboard, or to paste text from the clipboard into the terminal. Step 1: Open Terminal Open the terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T on your keyboard or by searching for it in the applications menu. Step 2: Install xclip To install xclip from the command line: On Debian/Ubuntu-based distros, run: sudo apt install xclip On Fedora/RPM-based distros, run: sudo dnf install xclip On Arch-based distros, run: sudo pacman -S xclip Once installed, you can use the xclip command to manipulate the clipboard contents. Step 3: Copy Contents To copy the content of a file to the clipboard, use the xclip command with the -selection option and the c flag: xclip -selection c < file.txt This will copy the contents of file.txt to the clipboard. You can then paste the contents of the file into another application using the standard paste command (Ctrl+V or right-click and select Paste). That’s it! You have now copied the content of a file to the clipboard from the command line on Linux.
What is the command line equivalent of copying a file to clipboard?
What is the command line equivalent to pressing CTRL+C over a file in the file manager so that the file (not the filename) is copied to the clipboard? A situation where this can be useful and fast, for example, is when you want to copy to the clipboard a file from the directory you are in the terminal to quickly paste the file in the directory you are in the file manager. There are others.
This really doesn’t look like a duplicate to me. One answer is about general copy paste generally, and this one is about copy a file specific subject
How about a when a complete non-GUI Ubuntu is being used through ssh from macOS Terminal app or analogue?
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When you press Ctrl-C over a file in the file manager, the file’s contents IS NOT copied to the clipboard. A simple test: select a file in file manager, press Ctrl-C, open a text editor, press Ctrl-V. The result is not file’s contents but its full path.
In reality the situation is a bit more complicated because you can’t do the opposite — copy a list of filenames from a text editor and paste them into file manager.
To copy some data from command line to X11 clipboard you can use xclip command, which can be installed with
sudo apt-get install xclip to copy contents of a file or output of some command to clipboard use
the text can be then pasted somewhere using middle mouse button (this is called «primary selection buffer»).
If you want to copy data to the «clipboard» selection, so it can be pasted into an application with Ctrl-V, you can do
cat ./myfile.txt|xclip -i -selection clipboard To be able to copy files from the command line and paste them in a file manager, you need to specify a correct «target atom» so the file manager recognizes the data in the clipboard, and also provide the data in correct format — luckily, in case of copying files in a file manager it’s just a list of absolute filenames, each on a new line, something which is easy to generate using find command:
find $ -name "*.pdf"| xclip -i -selection clipboard -t text/uri-list (at least this works for me in KDE). Now you can wrap into a small script which you can call, say, cb :
#!/bin/sh xclip -i -selection clipboard -t text/uri-list then you put it in ~/bin , set executable bit on it and use it like this:
Copy the contents of a file into the clipboard without displaying its contents
How to copy the contents of a file in UNIX without displaying the file contents. I don’t want to cat or vi to see the contents. I want to copy them to clipboard so that I can paste it back on my windows notepad. I can’t copy the file from that server to another due to access restrictions.
if your file is huge the clipboard will fail anyway. When the access restrictions say, that you cannot read the file, you are lost of course. If you cannot copy the file because you can’t write the file you must ask yourself, if there is another destination you can write to.
You could, perhaps, edit the file on the system itself. You then wouldn’t need to copy the contents anywhere.
I just asked a related question since I can’t get xclip working when logging into Ubuntu from Git Bash on Windows: stackoverflow.com/q/60117294/470749
4 Answers 4
X11
If using X11 (the most common GUI on traditional Unix or Linux based systems), to copy the content of a file to the X11 CLIPBOARD selection without displaying it, you can use the xclip or xsel utility.
to store the content of file as the CLIPBOARD X11 selection.
To store the output of a command:
mycommand | xclip -sel c mycommand | xsel -b Note that it should be stored using an UTF-8 encoding or otherwise pasting won’t work properly. If the file is encoded using an another character set, you should convert to UTF-8 first, like:
for a file encoded in latin1/iso8859-1.
xsel doesn’t work with binary data (it doesn’t accept null bytes), but xclip does.
To store it as a CUT_BUFFER (those are still queried by some applications like xterm when nothing claims the CLIPBOARD or PRIMARY X selections and don’t need to have a process running to serve it like for selections), though you probably won’t want or need to use that nowadays:
xprop -root -format CUT_BUFFER0 8s -set CUT_BUFFER0 "$(cat file)" (removes the trailing newline characters from file ).
GNU screen
GNU screen has the readbuf command to slurp the content of a file into its own copy-paste buffer (which you paste with ^A] ). So:
Apple OS/X
Though Apple OS/X can use X11. It doesn’t by default unless you run a X11 application. You would be able to use xclip or xsel there as OS/X should synchronise the X11 CLIPBOARD selection with OS/X pasteboard buffers, but that would be a bit of a waste to start the X11 server just for that.
On OS/X, you can use the pbcopy command to store arbitrary content into pasteboard buffers:
(the file’s character encoding is expected to be the locale’s one). To store the output of a command:
Shells
Most shells have their own copy-paste buffers. In emacs mode, cut and copy operations store the copied/cut text onto a stack which you yank/paste with Ctrl-Y , and cycle through with Alt+Y
zsh CUTBUFFER/killring
In zsh , the stack is stored in the $killring array and the top of the stack in the $CUTBUFFER variable though those variables are only available from Zsh Line Editor (zle) widgets and a few specialised widgets are the prefered way to manipulate those.
Because those are only available via the ZLE, doing it with commands is a bit convoluted:
zmodload zsh/mapfile zle-line-init() < if [ -n "$FILE_TO_COPY" ]; then zle copy-region-as-kill $mapfile[$FILE_TO_COPY] unset FILE_TO_COPY fi >zle -N zle-line-init file-copy() FILE_TO_COPY=$1:A The zle-line-init special widget is executed once at the start of each new command prompt. What that means is that the file will only be copied at the next prompt. For instance, if you do:
The file will only be copied after those 2 seconds.