Copying to the Windows Clipboard from WSL

Found a fun little hack today while trying to copy some test output from my Ubuntu WSL terminal into the Windows clipboard.

Yeah yeah, I know you can select the text in your terminal and it’ll automatically be copied into your clipbaord. There’s just one problem with that. You have to use a mouse (🤮). If you’re anything like me, taking your hands off the keyboard mid-flow is akin to sacrilege.

Anyways, here’s a quick example:

cat some_file.txt | clip.exe

That will copy the content of some_file.txt into your windows clipboard. Since it’s just piping data into the clip.exe program you can literally drop anything into your clipboard. test output? sure! a whole image? sure!

Anyways; I found it useful so thought I would share.