xwmx / pb

A tiny wrapper combining pbcopy & pbpaste in a single command.

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pb

A tiny wrapper combining pbcopy & pbpaste in a single command.

Copy to or paste from the macOS / OS X clipboard / pasteboards. With no input, pb prints the current contents of the clipboard to stdout using the pbpaste command. When input is passed via stdin or an argument, pb acts as a wrapper for pbcopy, which in the simplest case means that it replaces the clipboard contents with the input. pb also includes a pb --clear flag to easily clear the macOS clipboard.

# save the string "Example text." to the clipboard
> pb "Example text."

# print the clipboard contents
> pb
Example text.

# save the string "Example piped text." to the clipboard
> echo "Example piped text." | pb

# print the clipboard contents
> pb
Example piped text.

# clear the clipboard contents
> pb --clear
Pasteboards / Clipboard cleared.

Installation

Homebrew

To install with Homebrew:

brew tap xwmx/taps
brew install pb

npm

To install with npm:

npm install -g pb.sh

bpkg

To install with bpkg:

bpkg install xwmx/pb

Manual

To install manually, simply add the pb script to your $PATH. If you already have a ~/bin directory, you can use the following command:

curl -L https://raw.github.com/xwmx/pb/master/pb \
  -o ~/bin/pb && chmod +x ~/bin/pb

Usage

Usage:
  pb [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}] [-Prefer {txt | rtf | ps}]
  pb <input> [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}]
  pb --clear
  pb --version
  pb -h | --help

Options:
  --clear    Clear the contents of all pasteboards.
  -pboard    Specify the pasteboard to copy to or paste from.
             Default: general
  -Prefer    Specify what type of data to look for in the pasteboard first.
  --version  Print the current program version.
  -h --help  Show this screen.

Examples:
  pb "Example text."          Copy data specied with an argument.
  echo "Example text." | pb   Copy piped data.
  pb                          Print contents of the clipboard / pasteboard.

More information:
  Run `man pbcopy` or `man pbpaste`.

Background and Terminology

macOS refers to the clipboard as the pasteboard. There are multiple pasteboards, with "general" as the default that is used when no pasteboard is specified. The "general" pasteboard is also used in Universal Clipboard.

Clipboard / Pasteboard Developer Documentation:

• Pasteboard | Apple Developer Documentation Archive
• NSPasteboard | Apple Developer Documentation
• NSPasteboardName | Apple Developer Documentation

Tests

To run the test suite, install Bats and run bats test in the project root.