Copy from terminal output using xclip

In this post we are going to copy the terminal output using xclip, this is useful when you need to take the data outside the terminal.

Install xclip on Ubuntu/Debian

The first step is to install the application in our system:

sudo apt-get install xclip

Create alias:

Let’s crete alias so xclip works the same as pbcopy/pbpaste when using MacOS.

If you are using bash, edit your ~/.bashrc file adding these lines:

alias pbcopy='xclip -selection c'
alias pbpaste='xclip -o -selection c'

Example

Let’s make a request to an API:

curl https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/mew

If we didn’t have xclip, we could select all the information using the mouse and then press control+shift+c to copy it.

But this data is very long (400k characters), so it’s a waste of time to select it all and it’s not conformable to scroll several pages of the terminal.

Let’s use the alias to redirect the curl output to the clipboard

curl https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/mew | pbcopy

Now we can paste the content anywhere we want.