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sanjihan
Asked: 2024-09-12 17:47:30 +0800 CST

cat file contents to clipboard over ssh and across different OS

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I am connected over ssh to remote ubuntu and am trying to cat file content on ubuntu 24.04 machine into clipboard on my MacOS.

On my local OSX machine, I ssh into server and execute:

cat /usr/share/doc/apache2/README.Debian | xclip -selection clipboard

This causes an error: Can't open display: (null)

I tried sshing with -X flag, same problem.

I can copy the files over with stfp, but it would nice to do it with a clipboard instead. Is xclip capable of doing cross OS clipboard copying?

ssh

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Is xclip capable of doing cross OS clipboard copying?

    It is, if both sides run X. Whether X is running on Linux, some BSD, Windows, or macOS (which is basically some BSD) doesn't matter. The problem is that you don't have X on macOS. The implementation of X on macOS is called XQuartz (here's a random link that turned up on Google for running it - I haven't tried it). That said, I don't know how well XQuartz's clipboard syncs with macOS's native clipboard.

    What I'd suggest is running pbcopy locally. Example:

    ssh some-server cat /usr/share/doc/apache2/README.Debian | pbcopy

    This runs cat on the server and pbcopy on the local macOS system, and both commands will be happy. This is what I do personally (I have SSH connection reuse enabled, so starting another SSH session costs me nothing).

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