How to copy to a clipboard in Linux

Problem – You have a file with hundreds or thousands of lines and you want to copy the contents of this file and paste it to an external application, for instance to a browser.

Solution – The first attempt is to try to cat the file and scroll down with your mouse to select each line. This is time consuming or in some cases might not work if there are too many lines as some of the lines will ‘scroll out of the terminal’. One way of getting around this is to use “xclip” – a command line interface to X selections (clipboard).

In my case I wanted to copy the contents of ‘/tmp/ipaddresses.txt’ file to a browser for blogging. The file had 10000 lines. I used the following commands, first to install xclip and then to copy the file contents to a clipboard –

apt-get -y install xclip
xclip -sel cli < /tmp/ipaddresses.txt

The xclip command basically does a selection (-sel) from the file into the clipboard(-cli), where you can copy paste to any other external application.

Once you have the contents of the file in your clipboard, simply paste it, usually with Ctrl+v or Ctrl+Shift+v, to the intended application or file.

References –
https://linux.die.net/man/1/xclip

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5130968/how-can-i-copy-the-output-of-a-command-directly-into-my-clipboard