pbcopy and pbpaste
Thursday March 17, 2011
The Unix command line has historically interacted poorly with the
numerous graphical interfaces that have been stacked upon it. One
key area lacking support is the clipboard. MacOS X brings two
utilities to close that gap, pbcopy and
pbpaste. These commands together provide complete
access to the MacOS X clipboard (which Apple calls the pasteboard,
explaining the names of these two commands).
The first of the two, pbcopy, takes its input from
the standard input and adds it to the system clipboard. The command
only accepts one option, -pboard, which accepts one of
four suboptions, “general”, “ruler”, “find”, and “font”, all of
which are different system clipboards available on MacOS X. The
general pasteboard is the main system clipboard and the others are
for special use.
The pbpaste pulls data from the clipboard and
prints it to the standard output. Like pbcopy,
pbpaste accepts the option -pboard to
determine which pastebaord to acquire data from. The
pbpaste command adds a second option, -Prefer
which takes three possible options “txt”, “rtf”, and “ps”. These
options direct pbpaste looks for a certain type of formated
information on the pbasteboard. The “txt” flag suggests standard
text data. The “rtf” and “ps” suggest Rich Text Format and PostScript,
respectively. Despite this option, it is not possible to direct
the exact output pbpaste prints. This option only
tells pbpaste what type of information to return
first.
These two commands offer the MacOS X command line warrior a simple and fairly complete set of tools for working with and manipulating the MacOS X pasteboards.