or how to abandon that pesky mouse.
Today I learned a very interesting command line tool.
Say you need to put something rapidly into the clipboard from the command line and output it somewhere else later.
I normally would’ve used the mouse for a quick copy paste.
But why use the mouse at all?
You don’t have to, the xsel [1] tool is here to help you.
See this StackOverflow answer [2] to the question “How do I send stdin to the clipboard?”.
I came across this tool when I was using gnu-screen [3] and after having created a new window I wanted to cd
into the same directory in both windows.
To avoid getting out of the home row [4] I thought:
“Why not cd
once into the path and then copy the output of pwd
and pass it into cd
in the other screen?”
So I did.
In window 1)
1 | cd /path/to/folder |
Move to window 2)
1 | cd $(xsel -o -b) |
et voilà
Note that in this case there was no need to pass the -b parameter since I don’t really need it in the clipboard but my initial thought process involved having it there.
Another thing to note is that I couldn’t simply use environment variables [5] because they’re not shared between windows in gnu-screen.
Thoughts? Can you think of other useful use cases for this? Better ways to solve my dumb problem? gnu-screen/tmux/etc lovers/haters that want to contribute in any way?
[1] http://linux.die.net/man/1/xsel
[2] http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3892/how-do-i-send-stdin-to-the-clipboard
[3] http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/549/tmux-vs-gnu-screen
[4] http://www.typing.com/tutor/
[5] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/environment_variables