Copy/paste command-line utilities

February 4, 2005 on 4:14 pm | In General |

The use of the mouse pointer to mark and copy text from the Command window in Windows can be quite cumbersome. Out of exasperation, I created the following utilities that are based on _pbcopy_ and _pbpaste_, available in Mac OS X.

These require the .NET framework as can be seen below. The code compiled with Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1.

*clipin.cs*

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Windows.Forms;

public class ClipboardCopy
{
	public static void Main(string[] args)
	{
		string input = Console.In.ReadToEnd();

		Clipboard.SetDataObject(input, true);

		Console.WriteLine("Text copied to clipboard.");
	}
}

*clipout.cs*

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Windows.Forms;

public class ClipboardPaste
{
	public static void Main(string[] args)
	{
		IDataObject data = Clipboard.GetDataObject();

		if (data.GetDataPresent(DataFormats.Text) )
		{
			Console.Out.WriteLine("n" + data.GetData(DataFormats.Text)) ;
		}
	}
}

Usage: C: | clipin.exe

Usage: C:clipout.exe |

The code is pretty much self-explanatory and should not require further details. But if you need more information, please let me know.

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