Copy and paste inside a shell script

The Terminal application supports copy and paste from the Edit menu or using the standard keyboard shortcuts. In addition, two native Apple command line programs, pbcopy and pbpaste, allow you to copy and paste text from the clipboard within a shell script.

pbcopy takes standard in and places it in the specified pasteboard (the clipboard). For example, to capture the output of the ls -1 command, pipe the output to pbcopy:

ls -1 | pbcopy

Now, the results can be pasted into any program that supports the clipboard.

pbpaste writes the contents of the pasteboard (the clipboard) to standard out. For example, to paste the contents of the clipboard into a text file called "output.txt", use:

pbpaste > output.txt