Linux: command line cut and paste

It's always annoyed me that I have to open up a file in order to cut and paste the contents into a web browser (I use this a lot for capturing information on an internal wiki). As of 2010-03-23 there are no default command line access utilities for this (on CentOs anyway).

However, download and install xclip and the clipboard is yours to command.

xclip allows access to both the PRIMARY (middle mouse button) and SECONDARY (standard copy/paste) selections.

By default piping into xclip puts the text in the PRIMARY clipboard (middle mousebutton).

> echo $RANDOM | xclip
> xclip -o
4807

You can define which selection to input to. Say you want to store text in the SECONDARY selection (accessed using standard cut and paste commands):

> echo $RANDOM | xclip -sel 'clipboard'
> xclip -o -sel 'clipboard'
4807

You can now use edit->paste to output the text. Note that the random number was the same as before. I guess this is some shell caching mechanism. For a new random number each time you have to use a new shell:

> (echo $RANDOM) | cat
1297