Two of my favourite shell commands on macOS are pbcopy and pbpaste.

pbcopy (“pasteboard-copy”) copies text from standard input, just like Command-C.

echo "Hello, world" | pbcopy

Similarly, pbpaste (“pasteboard-paste”) pastes the contents of the pasteboard to standard output - like Command-V.

pbpaste
# Hello, world

This is the same pasteboard the rest of macOS uses, making it easy to copy/paste text to and from GUI programs.

The real beauty of these two becomes apparent when we compose them with other tools, just like the founders of Unix intended.

Read on for some of my favourite use cases, pulled straight from my shell history.

Formatting JSON

Using jq to format JSON:

# Pasteboard before:
# {"x":1  , "y" :  2, "z":3}

pbpaste | jq . | pbcopy

# Pasteboard after:
# {
#   "x": 1,
#   "y": 2,
#   "z": 3
# }

Decoding base64

For peeking inside random base64 encoded values:

# Pasteboard:
# SGVsbG8sIHdvcmxkIQo=

pbpaste | base64 -D
# Hello, world!

Uppercasing a string

Read as:

• transform - tr
• all lowercase characters - '[[:lower:]]'
• to uppercase - '[[:upper:]]'

# Pasteboard before:
# c600a378-2055-4f2f-82a2-fd00a6ea9629

pbpaste | tr '[[:lower:]]' '[[:upper:]]' | pbcopy

# Pasteboard after:
# C600A378-2055-4F2F-82A2-FD00A6EA9629

How long is that string?

The wc (word count) command can be used to count characters (-c), lines (-l), and of course, words (-w).

# Pasteboard contents:
# The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

pbpaste | wc -w
#      9

pbpaste | wc -c
#      43

And my favourite, x = x

Got a bunch of pesky text formatting in your pasteboard? Want to get rid of it?

pbpaste | pbcopy

Thanks for reading! Got any novel use cases for pbcopy/pbpaste? I’d love to hear about them, I’m @darrenclark on Twitter.