April 01, 2023

Use pbcopy and pbpaste on Ubuntu

After using Mac for a couple of years for work reasons I got used to the pbcopy and pbpaste commands to copy and paste stuff from the terminal. Now that I’m back to Linux on my daily driver I figured out a simple way to do the same.

The process is straightforward:

Install xclip:
```
sudo apt install xclip
```

Edit your .bash_aliases and add the new commands:

alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'

Reload your bash configuration file:
```
source ~/.bashrc
```
Test your new aliases:
```
echo "Hello World!" | pbcopy
pbpaste
```
You see “Hello World!” copied by your first command and pasted by the second. That’s it!

Posted by Miklo Hoffman