If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to copy the entire contents of a text file to the clipboard, you may end up doing something like the following:
- Open the file in a text editor.
- Select all text.
- Copy to clipboard.
It can be a blow to your productivity to stop what you’re doing and do the above, especially if you were working at the command line. Another disadvantage to doing it this way is that, if you close the program from which you copied the text, it clears the clipboard. If you forget this (or you simply didn’t know about this little quirk), then you may end up wasting more time repeating those steps to get that text into your clipboard.
xsel and xclip are two commands that allow you to interact with the X clipboards. Before I explain how to use them though, a short overview of the X clipboards is in order.
X11 has not one, not two, but three clipboards. They are called:
- PRIMARY – Also known as the “primary selection” or the “primary clipboard”. This clipboard is populated whenever you highlight text with the mouse. If you’ve ever highlighted text and noticed that you can paste it by clicking the middle button on your mouse, this is the clipboard being used.
- SECONDARY – This clipboard is very rarely used anymore, but exists to provide a “secondary selection” clipboard to accompany the primary selection.
- CLIPBOARD – This is the clipboard you are likely most familiar with. It is the one used when you copy text from an application such as a web browser, or a GUI text editor like gedit.
For our demonstration, we’ll use the CLIPBOARD selection as it is the clipboard you’re most likely to be using on a regular basis. To begin, let’s create a file we can use to test:
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$ echo "Hello world" >foo.txt |
You can verify the file has been created using the cat command to print it to standard output.
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$ cat foo.txt Hello world |
So, say that we’d like to get the contents of foo.txt to the clipboard. With xsel, you can do it like so:
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$ cat foo.txt | xsel -ib |
The -i option tells xsel to read from standard input. In this case, standard input is being piped in from the cat command. The b option tells xsel to use the CLIPBOARD selection. To use the PRIMARY selection, you’d replace the b with p, and to use SECONDARY you’d replace it with s.
To copy the contents of the text file to the clipboard using xclip, you can use the following:
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$ cat foo.txt | xclip -selection clipboard |
To use the PRIMARY selection, you’d replace clipboard with primary, and to use SECONDARY you’d replace it with secondary.
If you press Ctrl-V in another application, you’ll notice that the words “Hello world” were pasted.
In addition to copying standard input to the clipboards, xsel and xclip both have the ability to print the contents of the clipboards to standard output. Go ahead and select some text with your mouse and copy it to the clipboard using Ctrl-C, then try the commands below. (I will copy a few words from the previous sentence as an example.)
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$ xsel -ob Go ahead and select some text $ xclip -o -selection clipboard Go ahead and select some text |
In both cases, -o is used to tell the command to print the contents of the specified clipboard to standard output.
The arguments to xclip can be abbreviated, so you don’t have to type -selection clipboard every time you want to use it. For example:
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$ xclip -o -sel clip Go ahead and select some text $ xclip -o -s c Go ahead and select some text |
Both commands have additional features not described here, so check their man pages for more ideas.
Hopefully these commands can help you save time and increase your productivity when working from the command line. They’ve certainly done so for me.
