Comment by acg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acg | Hacker News Reader

On OS X pbcopy and pbpaste are useful for working with clipboard data. Copy data from a web-page or whatever, manipulate it on the command-line to get what you want. Putting reasonably large files in the clipboard can be useful too.

For example:

  curl http://news.bbc.co.uk/ | pbcopy # copies a web-page to clipboard

Depending on what you are doing it can be very useful:

  pbpaste | sort | pbcopy # sort the contents of the clipboard.

Another useful feature of OS X is open, which uses the finder to open a file:

  open file.pdf

  open music.mp3

The equivalent Linux commands are:

    # xclip:
    curl http://example.org | xclip

And instead of "open", you can use:

    xdg-open file.pdf
    xdg-open music.mpe

(or even gnome-open if you're on gnome) will open up the file with their default handler

You can also specify the app to open using the -a flag and specifying the full name of the app (with correct spacing and capitalization), e.g.:

    open -a 'TextEdit' foobar.txt
    open -a 'TextMate' foobar.txt

I also find it useful to have multiple instances of certain applications sometimes:

  open -na safari

And "open" works on bundles, allowing you to avoid descending into the /Contents/... part.

    open /Applications/FooBar.app

open also takes the -a argument to specify which application to use. It's very handy for things like this:

    alias shop="open -a Adobe\ Photoshop\ CS3"

open -a finder <dir> is a pretty handy way to open a finder window to current directory.

You can just pass the directory, no need to specify finder.

  open .
  open /Applications

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