This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

PBCOPY(1)                                                                                          PBCOPY(1)



NAME
       pbcopy, pbpaste - provide copying and pasting to the pasteboard (the Clipboard) from command line

SYNOPSIS
       pbcopy [-help] [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}]

       pbpaste [-help] [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}] [-Prefer {ascii | rtf | ps}]

DESCRIPTION
       pbcopy takes the standard input and places it in the specified pasteboard. If no pasteboard is speci-fied, specified,
       fied, the general pasteboard will be used by default.  The input is placed in the pasteboard as ASCII
       data  unless  it  begins  with  the Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file header or the Rich Text Format
       (RTF) file header, in which case it is placed in the pasteboard as one of those data types.

       pbpaste removes the data from the pasteboard and writes it to the standard output.  It normally looks
       first for ASCII data in the pasteboard and writes that to the standard output; if no ASCII data is in
       the pasteboard it looks for Encapsulated PostScript; if no EPS if present it looks for Rich Text.  If
       none of those types is present in the pasteboard, pbpaste produces no output.

OPTIONS
       -pboard {general | ruler | find | font}
              specifies  which  pasteboard to copy to or paste from.  If no pasteboard is given, the general
              pasteboard will be used by default.

       -Prefer {ascii | rtf | ps}
              tells pbpaste what type of data to look for in the pasteboard first.  As stated above, pbpaste
              normally looks first for ASCII data; however, by specifying -Prefer ps you can tell pbpaste to
              look first for Encapsulated PostScript.  If you specify -Prefer rtf, pbpaste looks  first  for
              Rich  Text  format.   In any case, pbpaste looks for the other formats if the preferred one is
              not found.

SEE ALSO
       ADC Reference Library:
       Cocoa > Interapplication Communication > Copying and Pasting
       Carbon > Interapplication Communication > Pasteboard Manager Programming Guide
       Carbon > Interapplication Communication > Pasteboard Manager Reference

BUGS
       There is no way to tell pbpaste to get only a specified data type.



Apple Computer, Inc.                          January 12, 2005                                     PBCOPY(1)