Copy Shell Output

Dev tip 4/99

There are many times where I need the output of a shell command in another application (e.g., Slack, Chrome, etc). Selecting the output of a command with the mouse so I can copy doesn’t scale when the output is multiple screens long.

Luckily, OS X comes with a pair of nifty command line tools to help with this — pbcopy and pbpaste. Pipe a command into pbcopy to copy the output to the OS X clipboard — ready to paste in another application. Here’s an example:

$ cat /var/log/syslog | pbcopy 

I haven’t found too much use of pbpaste but it is listed for completeness. If you have uses for it, please let me know!