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macOS command-line tools you might not know about

(saurabhs.org)

2039 points Gadiguibou | 1 comments | 27 Jun 23 12:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.24s | source

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klausa ◴[27 Jun 23 12:42 UTC] No.36491947[source]▶

>>36491704 (OP) #

`pbcopy` and `pbpaste` are one of my most-loved in the list.

Dealing with some minified json, switching to iTerm, doing `pbpaste | json_pp | pbcopy` and having a clean output is _so_ nice.

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1. iuafhiuah ◴[27 Jun 23 12:59 UTC] No.36492108[source]▶

I find it so annoying that these only work with plain text and RTF. On X11 there is `xclip`[0] and on Wayland there is `wl-clipboard`[1] both of which support binary file formats either through parsing the header or explicitly setting the MIME type.

This means you can do things like copy an image from the terminal and paste it into a graphical program like a browser or chat client and vice-versa. Also can be very useful in shell scripts for desktop automation.

The workaround on MacOS is to use AppleScript via `osascript` to `set the clipboard to...`.

  [0] https://github.com/astrand/xclip
  [1] https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard