til/mac/write-system-clipboard-to-a-file.md

Write System Clipboard To A File

MacOS has two CLI utilities pbcopy and pbpaste which, respectively, copy to and paste from the system clipboard via the CLI.

Let's say I've just copied a large block of text from somewhere onto my system clipboard. I now want to paste that into a new file. Instead of creating a new file, opening it up in my preferred editor, pasting all that text, and saving the file, I can run one small command from the CLI.

$ pbpaste > data.txt

This redirects the contents of pbpaste (which is the system clipboard) into the file data.txt. If that file doesn't already exist, then it will be created before the data is written to it.

See man pbpaste for more details.