I frequently administer remote servers over SSH, and need to copy data to my clipboard. If the text I want to copy all fits on one screen, then I simply select it with my mouse and press CMD-C, which asks relies on m y terminal emulator (xterm2) to throw it to the clipboard.
This isn't practical for larger texts, like when I want to copy the whole contents of a file.
If I had been editing large-file.txt locally, I could easily copy its contents by using the pbcopy command:
cat large-file.txt | pbcopy
In this writeup, I show how we can expose the pbcopy command as a network daemon that listens on port 5556, and is easily accessible from any machine you SSH into.
The quickest way to "networkify" pbcopy is to run the following snippet in a dedicated terminal tab:
while (true); do nc -l 5556 | pbcopy; doneWe just asked bash to launch netcat (nc), repeatedly wait for incoming connections on localhost:5556, and pipe any data received into pbcopy.
Now locally, the following two are equivalent:
echo "This text gets sent to clipboard" | pbcopy
echo "This text gets sent to clipboard" | nc localhost 5556
For security reasons, our "pbcopy daemon" only allows connections from localhost. But the goal is to allow you to pipe text to your local clipboard from a server you've SSHd into. This is done via SSH's reverse tunnel forwarding feature:
# SSH in to remote-server as usual, except -R asks that
# remote's port 5556 is forwarded to your laptop's localhost:5556
ssh [email protected] -R 5556:localhost:5556
If you'd prefer to enable reverse tunneling of port 5556 all your future outgoing SSH connections, the following adds the appropriate line to ~/.ssh/config:
echo "RemoteForward 5556 localhost:5556" >> ~/.ssh/config
Having established the SSH reverse tunnel, you can now do the following from the remote server:
cat large-file.txt | nc -q0 localhost 5556
# -q0 is required for GNU's version of netcat to exit on eof; the osx version does it by default
If the remote server is missing nc, either run sudo apt-get install netcat -y or use telnet instead:
cat large-file.txt | telnet localhost 5556
Enjoy your newly-supercharged clipboard!
If your laptop is running linux, replacing pbcopy with xcopy should work:
while (true); do nc -l 5556 | xcopy; doneFor a more verbose version of our "pbcopy daemon" that prints what's being sent to the clipboard, try this:
while (true); do echo "Waiting..." ; nc -l 5556 | pbcopy; echo "Copied: "; pbpaste | sed 's/^/ /'; doneTo automatically start the "pbcopy daemon" on boot, you should use launchd. See http://seancoates.com/blogs/remote-pbcopy (if down, use Google's cached version)
To expose pbpaste as well as pbcopy, see https://gist.github.com/burke/5960455