This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Tim Wong
Every of us knows copy & paste by ⌘-C and ⌘-V. Today I want to introduce you the pbcopy and pbpaste commands, for macOS exclusively.
pbcopy
Imagine that you want to copy the content of a file that has more than 1,000 lines on the terminal.
One way is to cat /path/to/file, and use your mouse/trackpad to scroll and highlight the content, then press ⌘-C to copy. However, this seemingly simple task could be very annoying because scroll-and-highlight isn't so straight-forward sometimes.
A much simpler way is to pipe the output to pbcopy.
cat /path/to/file | pbcopy
Now you can ⌘-V the copied content anywhere. 🥳
pbpaste
You can echo the copied content by pbpaste. For example, you can save the copied content into a file.
pbpaste > /path/to/file
Or, process the copied content before saving it.
# Remove the empty lines
pbpaste | egrep -v '^$' > /path/to/file
Or, process the copied content AND copy the new content with pbcopy.
pbpaste | egrep -v '^$' | pbcopy
Summary
pbcopy and pbpaste is just a small trick, but very useful in my day-to-day work. Hope they could become your favourite commands too! 😎
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Tim Wong
Tim Wong | Sciencx (2021-10-24T14:15:18+00:00) Copy & Paste – The Tricky Way on macOS Terminal. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/10/24/copy-paste-the-tricky-way-on-macos-terminal/
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