Zombie Zen

Unix Command Line of the Day

I wanted to paste a text file with my homework assignment into Gmail. Unfortunately, said text file was on the school server and I really didn’t want to permanently download the thing to my hard drive. So this is what I did:

scp $vogon:~/graph.txt /dev/stdout | pbcopy

This connects to the school server, retrieves graph.txt from my home directory, and copies it to standard out. I then piped the text into pbcopy, which is the Mac utility for manipulating the clipboard. After that, I switched to Gmail and did a paste.

Unix/bash is cool!

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