Learn how to – How To Copy and Paste Text Content from Linux Terminal

Learn how to – How To Copy and Paste Text Content from Linux Terminal.

You looking for an easy way to copy and paste text content using Linux command line interface?. This guide will show you the simple ways of copying and pasting contents from a clipboard all in a Linux command line.

Using Xorg Display server

For those using the Xorg display on their Desktop, the best tool for copy and pasting on command line is xclip. This tool can be installed easily using the commands below.

### Ubuntu / Debian ###
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install xclip

### Fedora / CentOS/RHEL 8 ###
sudo dnf -y install xclip

### Arch / Manjaro ###
sudo pacman -S xclip

Using Xclip

After installation, refer to below few examples to copy and paste contents on Linux terminal.

• Copy command execution output

top | xclip
uptime | xclip

• Copy file content to clipboard

xclip /etc/os-release
xclip -sel clip /etc/os-release

• Cat file contents and pipe to copy

tail -n 100 /var/log/messages | xclip -sel clip
cat myfile.txt | xclip -sel clip

• Copy with redirection key

xclip -sel clip < /etc/passwd

• Save copied content to file

xclip -o -sel clip > mydata.txt

Using Wayland Display server

For Wayland display server, we’ll use wl-clipboard. The wl-clipboard project implements two command-line Wayland clipboard utilities, wl-copy and wl-paste, that let you easily copy data between the clipboard and Unix pipes, sockets, files and so on.

Installing wl-clipboard

### Debian / Ubuntu ###
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install wl-clipboard

### Fedora ###
sudo dnf -y install wl-clipboard

### Arch / Manjaro ###
sudo pacman -S  wl-clipboard

Usage:

• Copy output of a command to clipboard

uptime | wl-copy
ls /etc | wl-copy

• Copy text message

wl-copy "Hello world.."

• Copy file contents to clipboard

wl-copy < /etc/passwd

# Image
wl-copy < ~/Pictures/photo.png

• Paste contents in clipboard to file

wl-paste > clipboard.txt

• Copy previous command

wl-copy "!!"

• Clear the clipboard

wl-copy -c

Other interesting tools to check:

• xsel — Command-line program for getting and setting the contents of the X selection.

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