This manual page is for Mac OS X version 10.6.3

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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 {txt | 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 plain
       text 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 plain text data in the pasteboard and writes that to the standard output; if no plain text
       data is in the pasteboard it looks for Encapsulated PostScript; if no EPS is  present  it  looks  for
       Rich Text.  If none of those types is present in the pasteboard, pbpaste produces no output.

       * Encoding:

       pbcopy  and  pbpaste  use locale environment variables to determine the encoding to be used for input
       and  output.   For  example,  absent  other  locale  settings,  setting  the   environment   variable
       LANG=en_US.UTF-8  will  cause  pbcopy  and pbpaste to use UTF-8 for input and output.  If an encoding
       cannot be determined from the locale, the standard C encoding will be used.  Use of UTF-8  is  recom-mended. recommended.
       mended.  Note that by default the Terminal application uses the UTF-8 encoding and automatically sets
       the appropriate locale environment variable.

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 {txt | rtf | ps}
              tells pbpaste what type of data to look for in the pasteboard first.  As stated above, pbpaste
              normally looks first for plain text 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.   The txt option replaces the deprecated ascii option, which continues to
              function as before.  Both indicate a preference for plain text.

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)