Improved pbcopy

2009-03-08

Here’s something else I’ve wanted to whip up for a long time. Mac’s pbcopy command is really handy, but I’d like it to accept arguments and treat them like cat or most other Unix commands: try to open each as a file and use its contents as input. I find myself writing something like “cat foo | pbcopy” a lot. Now I don’t have to:

#!/bin/sh

if [ -n "$1" ]; then
  cat "$@" | /usr/bin/pbcopy
else
  /usr/bin/pbcopy
fi

I’m not sure I’ve got the quoting right on the cat command, but it looks like it’s dinner time… .

UPDATE: No, the quoting was wrong. It’s fixed now.

I hope no one is upset about my “killing a cat”; that’s sort of the whole point.

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