How to get the stdout of a command into the clipboard on Ubuntu Linux ?

Pre-installed Commandline Tools on Ubuntu 🔗

xsel comes preintalled in Ubuntu Linux. Actually XSEL is pre-installed with XServer if you are using it. You can copy with xsel like this.

echo "text to be copied" | xsel -ib

Or copy by directing the output of text files like that.

xsel -ib < ~/.bashrc

You can paste the copied text into the standard output by this command.

xsel -ob

Or just use the command without any arguments.

xsel

Fish shell Tools 🔗

If you installed FISH shell on your Ubuntu Linux, you can use the tool made by Fish team to manage system clipboard (fish_clipboard_copy). You can Pipe the output of a command into the input of it like this.

cat ~/id_bus_ssh_pass.txt | fish_clipboard_copy

Fish shell has a command line tool to paste from clipboard too. You can use it like this.

fish_clipboard_paste | sed 's/A/B/g' | cat > new-text-file.txt

In that command, fish_clipboard_paste pastes the clipboard text into the stdout, then the sed program replaces every A character into B character, then the cat program concatenate the whole text output into a file called new-text-file.txt.

I hope this post helps you. If you know a person who can benefit from this information, send them a link of this post. If you want to get notified about new posts, follow me on YouTube , Twitter (x) , LinkedIn , and GitHub .