How to copy and paste within a terminal in macOS or Linux?

Artur Ziętkiewicz

September 9, 2025

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Sometimes we want to store some piece of information while using a terminal, for example, a result of an executed command. We usually save it into some temporary file which is going to be deleted after all. There’s a better way.

Copying and pasting on macOS

On macOS, there are two commands - pbcopy and pbpaste which leverage the system’s clipboard.

The pbcopy command puts input into the clipboard.

pbcopy “some text”

Piping output works surprisingly well:

ps aux | pbcopy

If you want to print the clipboard’s content all you need to do is run pbpaste.

Let’s say you want to copy and execute the file’s content. Of course, you may just use source file.sh but for the sake of this tutorial let’s assume that scenario.

First, create a file:

cat > file.sh <<EOF
echo "hello world"
EOF

Then you can copy its content with pbcopy:

pbcopy < file.sh

The last step is to execute the clipboard’s content:

pbpaste | zsh

Copying and pasting on Linux

You can create pbcopy and pbpaste commands on Linux. All you need to do is to add those two lines to the ~/.bashrc file and restart your terminal:

alias pbcopy=’xsel --clipboard --input’
alias pbpaste=’xsel --clipboard --output’

And… that’s it! I hope that those two commands will enhance your experience with the CLI.

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