clip

Copy and paste from the terminal.

Synopsis

command | clip [options] [-- tool options]
clip [options] file
clip -o [--primary]
clip -c [--primary]

Description

clip puts text on the clipboard, so you can paste it into a browser, a chat or an editor. It copies whatever you pipe into it, or the contents of a file you name. clip -o prints the clipboard, so you can pipe what you copied in a browser into a command. clip -c empties it.

Every Linux desktop has a different clipboard tool, with different options. clip picks the right one for the session you are in and runs it for you:

clip copies the bytes exactly. It adds nothing and strips nothing. echo hello | clip copies six bytes, with the newline at the end. Use printf when you do not want the newline, such as for a password you will paste into a login field.

After a copy, one line on stderr says how many bytes went to the clipboard, and with which tool.

Copying over SSH

On a server you reach over SSH there is no desktop and no clipboard tool. clip then sends the text to your terminal program with an OSC 52 escape code. The terminal on your own machine puts the text on your own clipboard. That means cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub | clip on a server copies the key to the laptop you are typing on.

Most modern terminals accept OSC 52, among them kitty, WezTerm, Alacritty, foot, iTerm2, Windows Terminal and xterm. GNOME Terminal and other VTE-based terminals do not. Some turn it off by default for safety. Inside tmux, clip wraps the code so tmux passes it on, and tmux needs set -g set-clipboard on or allow-passthrough on.

OSC 52 only copies. There is no way to read the clipboard back through the terminal, so clip -o over SSH exits 3. Terminals also limit how much they take, often 100 KB or less of encoded text, so clip warns when you send more than 74 KB.

Clearing after a while

--clear-after 30 copies the text, then empties the clipboard 30 seconds later, from a small job in the background. Use it for a password or a token, so it does not sit on the clipboard for the rest of the day.

Before it clears, the job reads the clipboard back and compares it with what clip put there. When you copied something else in the meantime, it leaves your new copy alone. Over OSC 52 it cannot read the clipboard back, so it always clears.

Options

--primary has no short form. In toolbelt -p always means a password.

Pass-through

Options after -- go to the tool that copies: wl-copy, xclip, xsel or pbcopy. Use this for what clip does not cover, such as a type for an image:

$ clip report.png -- --type image/png

That line is for wl-copy. With xclip the same thing is -- -t image/png. Nothing goes through with OSC 52.

Needs

One tool for your session. None over SSH or on macOS.

GNOME and KDE Plasma run Wayland by default on current releases, so wl-clipboard is the one most people need.

Examples

Copy a public key

$ clip ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
clip: copied 91 bytes with wl-copy

Paste into a command

Copy a manifest in the browser, then:

$ clip -o | kubectl apply -f -
deployment.apps/api configured
service/api unchanged

A secret that does not stay

$ ksecret db-creds DB_PASSWORD | clip --clear-after 30
clip: copied 12 bytes with wl-copy, clearing in 30s

Over SSH

$ echo hello | clip
clip: copied 6 bytes through the terminal with OSC 52
$ clip -o
clip: cannot read the clipboard with no display, OSC 52 only copies

See what it runs

$ echo hi | clip -v
clip: using xclip
+ xclip -selection clipboard -in < /tmp/.clip-uTmXnv/in
clip: copied 3 bytes with xclip

Empty the clipboard

$ clip -c
clip: cleared the clipboard

A missing tool

$ echo hello | clip
clip: needs xclip. Install it with: sudo apt install xclip

Troubleshooting

clip: needs xclip. Install it with: sudo apt install xclip

You are in an X11 session and neither xclip nor xsel is installed. Install one of them.

clip: needs wl-copy. Install it with: sudo apt install wl-clipboard

You are in a Wayland session with no wl-copy. Install wl-clipboard.

The copy worked over SSH but nothing is on my clipboard

Your terminal does not accept OSC 52, or has it turned off. Look for "clipboard" or "OSC 52" in its settings. In tmux, add set -g set-clipboard on to ~/.tmux.conf.

clip: no terminal to send the text to, OSC 52 needs one

clip ran with no display and no terminal, such as from cron. There is no clipboard to reach.

The text is gone when I close the terminal

On X11 the program that copied holds the text until something else takes the clipboard. xclip and wl-copy stay in the background for that, so this should not happen. A clipboard manager, such as the one in KDE or GNOME, also keeps a copy.

sudo clip does not work

sudo drops DISPLAY and WAYLAND_DISPLAY. Run clip as yourself: sudo cat /etc/file | clip.

Exit status

See also

genpass, ksecret, wl-copy(1), xclip(1), xsel(1)