Copy and Paste to and from a Text file in Command Line in OS X

Copy and Paste to and from a Text file in Command Line in OS X – yes, this is why we have the option in Syntax Highlighter to make it plain text or copy to clipboard! That is the basic reason to make the Syntax Highlighter Plugins a bit heavy – small point, but increases the speed of work! Even if you do not need this usage, but definitely you will be interested about our Copy and Paste to and from a Text file in Command Line guide, because – simply we need it!

Copy and Paste to and from a Text file in Command Line in OS X : Basics

Copy and Paste to and from a Text file in Command Line in OS X – Means, it has two parts (i) Copy from TXT or (in case it is applicable) Clipboard to CLI and (ii) The reverse – dumping the output to a Text file.

We are not going to the basic details of UNIX, Command Line Etc. – you can search our website to get most of them.

Copy and Paste to and from a Text file in Command Line in OS X : The Guide

Actually, you will get all the methods in UNIX command references, GNU Linux References and on Apple Docs. Several way exists.

pbcopy and pbpaste

pbcopy and pbpaste replace non-ASCII characters with question marks in some environments. It can be avoided by setting LC_CTYPE to UTF-8 :

Run the command to get the manual on Terminal :

Simply, typing pbpaste means the practical work of hitting command + v keys without execution of the command (nulled by %). If you want to paste from a text file to CLI, then the command will be :

In the reverse way, if you change the sign < to > then the things will get copied to a text file (dumping) :

As people copy paste the command ‘s usage too in blogs (funny, no?), they only shows the partial command as pbcopy > file.txt ! Actually, there are huge usages and functions :

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pbcopy.1.html

osascript

This is an example to Copy text to the clipboard from the OSX terminal :

Ref : https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/osascript.1.html

Using pipes like in GNU Linux

Actually, UNIX per se doesn’t have a clipboard. Some editors or GUI interfaces support the above things (Apple’s in our case). This is actually a big chapter itself. We will discuss it in details in future. We can copy paste dot files from repo like Github in this way.