[PLUG] OS X coolness: pbcopy and alpine
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
Tue Sep 3 18:18:40 UTC 2013
One of the neatest command-line tools in OS X is pbcopy (aka
Pasteboard Copy), which allows you to pipe stuff into the copy/paste
buffer. Its output counterpart is pbpaste.
So pbcopy allows you do to cool stuff like
grep thisfile.txt | awk '{neat operation}' | pbcopy
Then you can paste it anywhere.
In alpine (the only-barely maintained successor to pine, the CLI
e-mail client), you can enable pipe commands. Usually you do that to
modify the contents of your message, e.g., piping it to tr for ROT13
encoding.
I receive a lot of system e-mail messages, and occasionally I have to
put copies of them into trouble-tickets, wiki pages, or whatever. So
from within alpine (on OS X), I call the message for reading, then
| pbcopy
Then I paste a away, without ever having to lift a mouse or save the
mssage to the filesystem.
--
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W
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