MacOS – Copy & Paste doesn’t work

copy/pastehigh sierrakeyboardmacos

After updating latest patch on High Sierra 10.13 on a 2012 MacBook Air, I can no longer copy and paste text. I restarted computer, booted into safe mode, tried copy and pasting in various applications like Textedit. If I do 'cut', the text goes away but clipboard in Finder shows it's empty.

Activity Monitor shows pboard and pbs processes exist. I killed it and a new one appears with same problem. The problem happens using keyboard shortcuts as well as using menu. When I do Command-c, The Edit menu blinks blue while I do that. Drag and drop text works fine. Mouse keys are turned off. I don't have virtualbox. I don't have Copied or additional clipboard software installed.

How can I determine what the problem is? This was working fine yesterday.

Update: Copy and paste was fixed by restoring from Time Machine backup. Reapplying the same High Sierra patch worked fine after that.

Best Answer

From this Apple Support discussion:

So, to fix a stuck clipboard (pasteboard) problem, you simply need to:

  1. Open your application folder

  2. Open the utilities subfolder

  3. Open the Activity Monitor app

  4. Type “pboard” into the search box at the top right

  5. In the search results below, there should only be one result — a row listing the “pboard” process. Highlight it by clicking on it.

  6. Click the “x” button at the top left of the window which represents ‘quit this process’

Once you’ve done that, OS X will kill the faulty PBoard process and re-establish it with a fresh one automatically. Your clipboard should be back to normal.

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