When you use a clipboard of your desktop environment (DE), you may think, that it’s some global buffer. But it’s not it works inside DE. For example, come terminal utils use their own buffers – vim has its own buffers for working inside the editor.
But we have commands which you can use to copy and paste from / into desktop environment.
Working with MacOS clipboard
Open a terminal and do:
$ tail /var/log/system.log | pbcopyNow the last 10 lines of the log file are in the clipboard.
To put it somewhere else, that is, to paste it, do:
$ pbpaste > ~/Documents/somefile.txtCopy / Paste from Linux clipboard
You can do the same on Linux but with another commands:
pwd | xclip -selection clipboard
xclip -selection clipboard -o | cat
Or even create you own pbcopy and pbpaste aliases for GNU/Linux (as we did in “Bash aliases and startup commands“):
alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'
