If you have ever had a need to move the output of a Linux console command to your clipboard, xclip is the solution!

To copy a file’s contents to the standard “ctl+c/v” clipboard buffer issue you can following this command:

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xclip -sel clip your-file-path

The most useful feature is reading from a stdin pipe:

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head my-file-path | xclip -sel clip

…and then your ready to paste into an email or Slack chat.

This functionality is especially useful for programatically providing 2-factor authentication tokens to command-line or browser based logins!