pbcopy

Clipboard (pbcopy/pbpaste/osascript)

Automatically copy text, HTML, or images to the macOS clipboard so the user can paste it directly.

When to Use

• The user explicitly asks to copy something to the clipboard
• You generate a snippet (command, code, config, URL, token) that the user said they want to paste elsewhere
• The user asks to copy an image or rich text/HTML to the clipboard
• The user asks you to "put it in my clipboard" or "copy that for me"

Plain Text

# Copy text to clipboard
echo -n 'text to copy' | pbcopy

# Copy multi-line text to clipboard
cat <<'EOF' | pbcopy
line 1
line 2
EOF

# Copy file contents to clipboard
pbcopy < /path/to/file

# Copy command output to clipboard
some-command | pbcopy

# Read current clipboard contents
pbpaste

HTML / Rich Text

pbcopy automatically detects RTF headers, so convert HTML to RTF with textutil then pipe to pbcopy. The clipboard will contain rich text pasteable into Mail, Notion, Google Docs, etc.

# Convert HTML to RTF and copy to clipboard (preferred)
echo '<h1>Title</h1><p>This is <b>bold</b></p>' | textutil -stdin -format html -convert rtf -stdout | pbcopy

# From an HTML file
textutil -convert rtf /path/to/page.html -stdout | pbcopy

# Copy raw RTF directly (pbcopy auto-detects RTF header)
cat <<'EOF' | pbcopy
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0 Helvetica;}}\f0\fs24 Hello \b Bold\b0  World}
EOF

# Paste as RTF
pbpaste -Prefer rtf

If you need the clipboard to contain native HTML type (not RTF), use osascript:

cat <<'EOF' > /tmp/clip.html
<h1>Title</h1>
<ul><li>Item 1</li><li>Item 2</li></ul>
EOF
osascript <<'APPLESCRIPT'
use framework "AppKit"
set htmlContent to do shell script "cat /tmp/clip.html"
set pb to current application's NSPasteboard's generalPasteboard()
pb's clearContents()
pb's setString:htmlContent forType:(current application's NSPasteboardTypeHTML)
APPLESCRIPT
rm /tmp/clip.html

Images

pbcopy only handles text/RTF/EPS — images require osascript with NSPasteboard.