Copying Remote Command Output to Your macOS Clipboard
2 days ago
- The user finds macOS's pbcopy command useful for copying file contents to clipboard from the shell.
- pbcopy only works locally on Mac; it is unavailable on remote servers accessed via SSH.
- A solution uses the OSC 52 terminal escape sequence to copy text from remote servers to the local clipboard.
- The script works with iTerm2 and other OSC 52-compatible terminals (e.g., kitty, Ghostty), but not Apple's Terminal.app.
- iTerm2 requires enabling 'Applications in terminal may access clipboard' in Settings for this to work.
- The remote script is a simple shell script that base64-encodes input and outputs the OSC 52 sequence.
- The script is created on the remote server (e.g., /usr/local/bin/pbcopy) and made executable.
- This method has security implications as any terminal program could access the local clipboard.