Copy command to system clipboard
In Bash you can copy the previous command to the system clipboard directly from the command line, and have it be correctly quoted, using
$ echo !!:q | xsel --clipboard
This is very useful for sharing or embedding complex commands. Consider this example, with a command that includes quotation marks:
$ echo 'foo bar'
foo bar
$ echo !!:q | xsel -b
echo 'echo '\''foo bar'\''' | xsel -b
$ xsel -b
echo 'foo bar'
The first command, in its entirety, is the command we’re interested in copying.
In the second command, the
!!
history expansion
event designator
selects
the previously executed command, and the
q
modifier
wraps the command in
quotation marks, escaping characters as necessary. Wrapping the command in
quotation marks turns it into a single argument to the second
echo
, which
pipes it into
xsel
’s standard input. The final command dumps the contents of
the clipboard
selection
:
echo 'foo bar'
, as desired.
You might have
xclip(1)
instead of
xsel(1)
, in
which case you’ll need to pass different options, and on macOS you will
probably want to use
pbcopy(1)
.