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Comment by hibbelig | Hacker News Reader

I want "remote pbcopy"! I'd like to be able to log in to any remote host (usually Linux in my case), then tack something onto the command line I'm typing to copy it into the pastebuffer.

    ssh somehost
    cd /some/dir
    grep -lr foo . | remote_pbcopy

I guess something like this is possible with GNU Screen or with Tmux, and perhaps the Tmux/iTerm interaction helps, but I've never figured it out.

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I usually try to stick it all on one line when I have to do that, something like

    ssh somehost 'cd /some/dir; grep -lr foo .' | pbcopy

not very flexible, but it works for many cases

On your Mac:

    ssh -R 19999:localhost:22 remote_host

On the remote host:

    command_that_prints_stuff | ssh localhost -p 19999 pbcopy

________

The first command routes the port 19999 on the remote host to port 22 on the computer you're using.

ssh part on the second command connects to 19999 (and thus 22 on your computer) and runs the pbcopy command in the current shell (which is the pipe from command_that_prints_stuff)

That's cool. Thanks!

You could probably squash the 'ssh localhost -p 19999 pbcopy' into an alias too, to reduce the typing further.

EDIT: oh wait.. remote host.. ok, maybe, maybe not. depends on your environments I guess.

Why not just

    ssh remote_host command_that_prints_stuff | pbcopy

?

Depends on the situation, if you want to run a quick script then yours would be better. If you're spending a lot of time in remote_host then mine might make more sense.

I don't know if there's an equivalent for OSX but if you're running linux you can use x11 forwarding to do this:

  ssh -x example.com
  cat /var/log/syslog | grep event | xclip -i

Your X clipboard will be shared with the host so the output will be placed into your local clipboard.

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