If you have ever had a need to move the output of a Linux console command to your clipboard, xclip is the solution!
To copy a file’s contents to the standard “ctl+c/v” clipboard buffer issue you can following this command:
xclip -sel clip your-file-path
The most useful feature is reading from a stdin pipe:
head my-file-path | xclip -sel clip
…and then your ready to paste into an email or Slack chat.
This functionality is especially useful for programatically providing 2-factor authentication tokens to command-line or browser based logins!
Published on November 16th, 2020 by Alexander Crosby