Copy To Clipboard In MacOS Terminal

James Auble

Jul 3, 2020·1 min read

Copy From Terminal

Copy the output of something to the clipboard with pbcopy using the “pipe” character |:

$ pwd | pbcopy

You now have the “working directory” of that terminal in the clipboard.

Go ahead.

Cmd + V that sucker into another window and you’ll see something like:

/Users/username

Paste To Terminal

Guess which command will paste to the terminal???

You guessed it: pbpaste.

If you still have your working directory in the clipboard, when you run pbpaste you should see:

$ pbpaste
/Users/username

Ain’t that fun?