I sometimes wish pbcopy and pbpaste were the same command, and the command just Did What I Mean.

Although pbcopy and pbpaste can be used to do more than simply copy text data into and out of the general system clipboard, in practice, I never use those features. In fact, I sometimes find it annoying that there wasn’t just one tool provided that sensed if there was data on STDIN, copied it to the clipboard, and pasted data appropriately from the clipboard on STDOUT.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it should do both.

This utility could probably be written in C or Go, but I couldn’t think of any reasons I’d want native speed for CLI-based clipboard manipulation, so I papered over the existing utilities with a bit of shell:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

pb() {
  if [[ -p /dev/stdin ]]; then              # STDIN is attached to a pipe
    pbcopy
  fi

  if [[ ! -t 0 && ! -p /dev/stdin ]]; then  # STDIN is attached to a redirect
    pbcopy
  fi

  if [[ -t 1 ]]; then                       # STDOUT is attached to a TTY
    if [[ -t 0 ]]; then                     # STDIN is attached to TTY
      pbpaste
    fi
  fi

  if [[ -p /dev/stdout ]]; then             # STDOUT is attached to a pipe
    pbpaste
  fi

  if [[ ! -t 1 && ! -p /dev/stdout ]]; then # STDOUT is attached to a redirect
    pbpaste
  fi
}

And here it is again with some composure metadata:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33

pb() {
  author 'Erich Smith'
  about 'clipboard DWIM tool'
  example 'pb                    # paste'
  example 'echo hi | pb          # copy'
  example 'echo hi | pb | cat -  # copy and paste'
  example 'pb </tmp/file         # copy'
  example 'pb >/tmp/file         # paste'
  example 'pb </tmp/f1 >/tmp/f2  # copy and paste'
  group 'shell'

  if [[ -p /dev/stdin ]]; then              # STDIN is attached to a pipe
    pbcopy
  fi

  if [[ ! -t 0 && ! -p /dev/stdin ]]; then  # STDIN is attached to a redirect
    pbcopy
  fi

  if [[ -t 1 ]]; then                       # STDOUT is attached to a TTY
    if [[ -t 0 ]]; then                     # STDIN is attached to TTY
      pbpaste
    fi
  fi

  if [[ -p /dev/stdout ]]; then             # STDOUT is attached to a pipe
    pbpaste
  fi

  if [[ ! -t 1 && ! -p /dev/stdout ]]; then # STDOUT is attached to a redirect
    pbpaste
  fi
}

Credit to Dejay Clayton for his very informative SO post on the topic of STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR detection.