In this post we are going to copy the terminal output using xclip, this is useful when you need to take the data outside the terminal.
Install xclip on Ubuntu/Debian
The first step is to install the application in our system:
sudo apt-get install xclip
Shell
Create alias:
Let’s create alias so xclip works the same as pbcopy/pbpaste when using MacOS.
If you are using bash, edit your ~/.bashrc file adding these lines:
alias pbcopy='xclip -selection c'
alias pbpaste='xclip -o -selection c'
Shell
Example:
Let’s make a request to an API:
curl https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/mew
Plain Text
If we didn’t have xclip, we could select all the information using the mouse and then press control+shift+c to copy it.
But this data is very long (400k characters), so it’s a waste of time to select it all and it’s not conformable to scroll several pages of the terminal.
Let’s use the alias to redirect the curl output to the clipboard
curl https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/mew | pbcopy
Bash
Now we can paste the content anywhere we want.