How to use pbcopy and pbpaste on Linux (Ubuntu or others)

While I was learning more about Fabric (open-source AI framework) I learned that macOS had two native commands to copy and paste the clipboard content into the terminal: pbcopy and pbpaste. Their names comes from “pasteboard”, which is the term used in macOS for clipboard.

Since these two commands don’t work on Linux and would impact directly the way that I used command line tools, I’ve decided to see how to implement them.

Solution: Create an alias using another Linux command

After doing some research, I found xsel to be the best solution for me using X11 (you can check this in: Settings > System > System Details > Windowing System).

First you need to install it. Here is the command for Ubuntu/Debian distributions:

sudo apt install xsel

Then you need to edit your .bashrc file and add the following lines at the bottom:

# Linux version of macOS pbcopy and pbpaste
alias pbcopy='xsel --clipboard --input'
alias pbpaste='xsel --clipboard --output'

A quick explanation of the commands arguments:

• --clipboard is to make it operate on the CLIPBOARD selection. As an alternative you leave out this argument to make it operate on the primary selection (so you don’t need to copy a content, just select it);
• --input and --output is to enabled it to read or write the standard input or output into the selection. This is required if we passing the content from one command to another.

Restart your terminal or run the command bellow:

source ~/.bashrc

Now you can use pbcopy and pbpaste in your terminal, here is an example:

kossmann@abracadabra:~$ pbpaste
This text was copied from a website

kossmann@abracadabra:~$ echo "This is a terminal output" | pbcopy

kossmann@abracadabra:~$ pbpaste
This is a terminal output

Alternative solution for Wayland

I found the project wl-clipboard that implements two command-line Wayland clipboard utilities, wl-copy and wl-paste, that do the same thing.

What are the reasons for choosing xsel over xclip?

During my research I found out that xclip does not close STDOUT after it has read from the tmux buffer, which can cause various issues (some examples here and here with Sublime Merge).

A fun fact is that xsel has fewer dependencies than xclip:

kossmann@abracadabra:~$ apt-cache depends xsel
xsel
  Depends: libc6
  Depends: libx11-6

kossmann@abracadabra:~$ apt-cache depends xclip
xclip
  Depends: libc6
  Depends: libx11-6
  Depends: libxmu6