MacOS has two incredibly useful commands: pbcopy and pbpaste. They let you pipe text directly to and from the system clipboard from the terminal. Want to feed clipboard contents into an LLM? pbpaste | llm "summarize this". Want to grab command output and paste it elsewhere? jq 'keys' file.json | pbcopy.

These commands were such a delight to stumble upon on my work-provided Macbook Pro. I missed them when I had to hand back the machine upon the conclusion of the role, so I ended up writing some aliases that would bring these commands to all my regular platforms. Every platform has some method to interact with the clipboard, but the beauty of pbcopy and pbpaste is a simple software design philosophy:

Don’t make me think

Here’s what I added to my ~/.bashrc to satisfy my muscle memory:

pbpaste() {
    if [ -n "${DISPLAY}" ] && which xclip &>/dev/null; then
        xclip -selection c -o
    elif which wl-paste &>/dev/null; then
        wl-paste
    elif which pbpaste &>/dev/null; then
        command pbpaste
    else
        cat /tmp/clipboard
    fi
}

pbcopy() {
    if [ -n "${DISPLAY}" ] && which xclip &>/dev/null; then
        xclip -selection c
    elif which wl-copy &>/dev/null; then
        wl-copy
    elif which pbcopy &>/dev/null; then
        command pbcopy
    else
        cat - > /tmp/clipboard
    fi
}

These functions detect your environment and route clipboard operations to the right tool:

• pbpaste checks for X11 (xclip), then Wayland (wl-paste), then macOS, and finally falls back to reading from /tmp/clipboard
• pbcopy does the same in reverse: xclip, wl-copy, macOS pbcopy, or writes to /tmp/clipboard

These work exactly as I want them:

• Cross-platform abstraction: One interface works across macOS, X11, Waylan, and any system via a file fallback.
• Pipe-friendly: Functions accept standard input and output, integrating seamlessly with Unix pipes for chaining commands.
• Fallback to /tmp/clipboard: A simple file stores clipboard data as a last resort, ensuring functionality on any system — even without a graphical environment.

This means you can write scripts using pbcopy/pbpaste and they’ll work anywhere, without having to remember which clipboard tool each OS uses. A small addition that makes terminal life more pleasant across machines.