pbcopy(1) pbcopy(1)
NAME
pbcopy, pbpaste - provide copying and pasting to the pasteboard (the
Clipboard) from command line
SYNOPSIS
pbcopy [-help] [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}]
pbpaste [-help] [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}] [-Prefer {txt
| rtf | ps}]
DESCRIPTION
pbcopy takes the standard input and places it in the specified paste-
board. If no pasteboard is specified, the general pasteboard will be
used by default. The input is placed in the pasteboard as plain text
data unless it begins with the Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file
header or the Rich Text Format (RTF) file header, in which case it is
placed in the pasteboard as one of those data types.
pbpaste removes the data from the pasteboard and writes it to the stan-
dard output. It normally looks first for plain text data in the paste-
board and writes that to the standard output; if no plain text data is
in the pasteboard it looks for Encapsulated PostScript; if no EPS is
present it looks for Rich Text. If none of those types is present in
the pasteboard, pbpaste produces no output.
* Encoding:
pbcopy and pbpaste use locale environment variables to determine the
encoding to be used for input and output. For example, absent other
locale settings, setting the environment variable LANG=en_US.UTF-8 will
cause pbcopy and pbpaste to use UTF-8 for input and output. If an
encoding cannot be determined from the locale, the standard C encoding
will be used. Use of UTF-8 is recommended. Note that by default the
Terminal application uses the UTF-8 encoding and automatically sets the
appropriate locale environment variable.
OPTIONS
-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}
specifies which pasteboard to copy to or paste from. If no
pasteboard is given, the general pasteboard will be used by
default.
-Prefer {txt | rtf | ps}
tells pbpaste what type of data to look for in the pasteboard
first. As stated above, pbpaste normally looks first for plain
text data; however, by specifying -Prefer ps you can tell
pbpaste to look first for Encapsulated PostScript. If you spec-
ify -Prefer rtf, pbpaste looks first for Rich Text format. In
any case, pbpaste looks for the other formats if the preferred
one is not found. The txt option replaces the deprecated ascii
option, which continues to function as before. Both indicate a
preference for plain text.
SEE ALSO
ADC Reference Library:
Cocoa > Interapplication Communication > Copying and Pasting
Carbon > Interapplication Communication > Pasteboard Manager Program-
ming Guide
Carbon > Interapplication Communication > Pasteboard Manager Reference
BUGS
There is no way to tell pbpaste to get only a specified data type.
Apple Computer, Inc. January 12, 2005 pbcopy(1)
Mac OS X 10.6 - Generated Thu Sep 17 20:08:16 CDT 2009