One-liner to sort clipboard | Hacker News Reader

One-liner to sort clipboard

some.gonze.com

1 pointlucasgonze3 comments

On X-based systems, xsel -ob | sort | xsel -ib

But if you're in a high-octane development environment like vi, there's no need to resort to a separate terminal window to invoke 'sort clipboard'. just mark a range of lines (v) then :!sort to filter through good old unix sort.

Iterating on this idea just a little bit, you realize you want to apply any shell filter to your clipboard ...

    #!/bin/sh
    # save as xfilt
    xsel -ob | "$@" | xsel -ib

so, for instance, get a bit of json in your clipboard http://json.org/example.html and run xfilt jq .glossary.title. Now your clipboard contains "example glossary" instead of the whole json file.

One wrinkle is, if you get your filter wrong, you have to return to the original source to copy again, because the operation is destructive each time...

This is a trivial but super useful hack. The way you use it is:

1. You're in an edit field in any old app - browser, Atom, vi

2. Select lines to sort and ^c

3. alt+tab to command line

4. pbsort

5. alt+tab back to app

6. ^v

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