Ubuntu – How to efficiently send text entered on the command line to the system clipboard without using the mouse

bashclipboardcommand line

Say I've typed the following long command into the command line

 $ some very long command that I want to copy to the clipboard

How can I get this onto the system clipboard efficiently?
I'm using Gnome Terminal 2.23.1.

I know that I can get the mouse and highlight it and copy it, but I want a general keyboard solution.

It would also be good if it generalised to multiple command-line programs.

For example, in bash in vi mode, I can press v and then edit the command in vim, and thus use Vim's copy to clipboard features, but this doesn't work when using R on the command-line. It's also a bit slow.

I'd like it if in vi-mode, I could press yy and copy the contents of the line to the system clipboard, but this doesn't seem to work. Furthermore any yanking commands don't seem to copy contents to the system clipboard; they appear to only copy to a buffer used by bash.

UPDATE:

After posting I found

Best Answer

You could also use a clipboard manager like parcellite. It's a GTK+ clipboard manager which also has command-line clipboard capabilities

You can use it via command-line by

echo "some very long command that I want to copy to the clipboard" | parcellite
##or##
parcellite "some very long command that I want to copy to the clipboard"

It is not installed by default and so you'll have to install parcellite by sudo apt-get install parcellite

xsel

I am using xsel Install xsel, but I am only using it with plain text and unicode text.

xsel can copy and paste to three different "clipboards".

By default, it uses the X Window System primary selection, which is basically whatever is currently in selection. The X Window System also has a secondary selection (which isn't used much), and a clipboard selection. You're probably looking for the clipboard selection, since that's what the desktop environment (e.g. Gnome, KDE, XFCE) uses for its clipboard. To use that with xsel:

xsel --clipboard < new-clipboard-contents.txt
xsel --clipboard > current-clipboard-contents.txt

Ubuntu – How to get long command lines to wrap to the next line

Make sure all non-printable bytes in your PS1 are contained within \[ \]. Otherwise, bash will count them in the length of the prompt. It uses the length of the prompt to determine when to wrap the line.

For example, here bash counts the prompt as 19 columns wide, while the prompt displayed by the terminal is only 10 columns wide (My prompt written in cyan, and > written in default color):

PS1='\e[36mMy prompt\e[0m>'         # bash count: 19, actual: 10

while here it only counts the prompt as 10 columns wide because it ignores the bytes between the special \[ and \] escapes:

PS1='\[\e[36m\]My prompt\[\e[0m\]>' # bash count: 10, actual: 10

For good practice though, use tput to generate the terminal escapes rather than hard coding them:

cyan=$(tput setaf 6) # \e[36m
reset=$(tput sgr0)   # \e[0m
PS1='\[$cyan\]My prompt\[$reset\]>'

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/053, and also http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/terminalcodes for more on tput.

UPDATE:

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – A command-line clipboard copy and paste utility

xsel

Ubuntu – How to get long command lines to wrap to the next line

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