nanderoo / pbproxy

pbproxy - send your clipboard anywhere you can ssh to

TL;DR: pbcopy and pbpaste from any (mac or linux) machine you can ssh to

This is a simple tool to make it easy to interact with clipboards on remote machines. The "ui" mimics macOS's pbcopy and pbpaste commands using the original pbcopy and pbpaste on macOS, and wrapping xsel on Linux boxes. On linux boxes where xsel is not available (eg headless servers that don't have X) it falls back to storing clipboard contents in a temp file

In other words, you can pbcopy and pbpaste from any remote machines you have ssh access to. The special sauce is that you can put a server name from your ssh config on the end of a pbcopy or pbpaste command so you can do stuff like run echo hello | pbcopy server2 on server1, after which doing pbpaste from server2 would print 'hello'. You can also do this in the other direction with pbpaste, eg from server2 you can run pbpaste server1 and it'll print out the contents of server1's clipboard.

Prereqs:

For best results:

• make sure you have pbproxy installed at ~/.pbproxy on all machines you'll be copying/pasting to/from.
• make sure you have key-based ssh authentication set up (otherwise you'll have to enter your password each time you copy or paste)

Usage:

• Print the contents of another machine's clipboard to your local machine's stdout:

  pbpaste <some-server>
  

• Insert data into another machine's clipboard:

  echo hello there | pbcopy <some-server>
  

  You can also use this to send the contents of your current machine's clipboard to another machine:

  pbpaste | pbcopy <some-server>
  

• Print the contents of your local clipboard to stdout: pbpaste

• Insert data into your local clipboard: echo some data | pbcopy

NOTE: This tool works the same way regardless of whether it's running on a macOS or a linux machine. On macs it wraps the native pbcopy and pbaste commands, and on linux it uses xsel or a temp file

Installation

• Clone this repo to your local machine
• Add the folder you cloned it to to your PATH through your ~/.bashrc/~/.zshrc files (NOTE: on macOS, make sure it comes BEFORE /usr/bin on your PATH, otherwise the native pbcopy and pbpaste will take precedence)
• restart your shell (or on zsh do hash -r) and try it out.

For the lazy (read: efficient), copy/pasting this quick and dirty shell snippet should get the job done:

git clone https://github.com/nikvdp/pbproxy ~/.pbproxy
ps | grep $$ | grep -q zsh && echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.pbproxy:$PATH"' | tee -a ~/.zshrc
ps | grep $$ | grep -q bash && echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.pbproxy:$PATH"' | tee -a ~/.bashrc
export PATH="$HOME/.pbproxy:$PATH"
hash -r