PBCOPY(1)                   General Commands Manual                  PBCOPY(1)

NAME
       pbcopy, pbpaste - provide copying and pasting to the pasteboard (the
       Clipboard) from command line

SYNOPSIS
       pbcopy [-help] [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}]

       pbpaste [-help] [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}] [-Prefer {txt
       | rtf | ps}]

DESCRIPTION
       pbcopy takes the standard input and places it in the specified
       pasteboard. If no pasteboard is specified, the general pasteboard will
       be used by default.  The input is placed in the pasteboard as plain
       text data unless it begins with the Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file
       header or the Rich Text Format (RTF) file header, in which case it is
       placed in the pasteboard as one of those data types.

       pbpaste removes the data from the pasteboard and writes it to the
       standard output.  It normally looks first for plain text data in the
       pasteboard and writes that to the standard output; if no plain text
       data is in the pasteboard it looks for Encapsulated PostScript; if no
       EPS is present it looks for Rich Text.  If none of those types is
       present in the pasteboard, pbpaste produces no output.

       * Encoding:

       pbcopy and pbpaste use locale environment variables to determine the
       encoding to be used for input and output.  For example, absent other
       locale settings, setting the environment variable LANG=en_US.UTF-8 will
       cause pbcopy and pbpaste to use UTF-8 for input and output.  If an
       encoding cannot be determined from the locale, the standard C encoding
       will be used.  Use of UTF-8 is recommended.  Note that by default the
       Terminal application uses the UTF-8 encoding and automatically sets the
       appropriate locale environment variable.

OPTIONS
       -pboard {general | ruler | find | font}
              specifies which pasteboard to copy to or paste from.  If no
              pasteboard is given, the general pasteboard will be used by
              default.

       -Prefer {txt | rtf | ps}
              tells pbpaste what type of data to look for in the pasteboard
              first.  As stated above, pbpaste normally looks first for plain
              text data; however, by specifying -Prefer ps you can tell
              pbpaste to look first for Encapsulated PostScript.  If you
              specify -Prefer rtf, pbpaste looks first for Rich Text format.
              In any case, pbpaste looks for the other formats if the
              preferred one is not found.  The txt option replaces the
              deprecated ascii option, which continues to function as before.
              Both indicate a preference for plain text.

SEE ALSO
       ADC Reference Library:
       Cocoa > Interapplication Communication > Copying and Pasting
       Carbon > Interapplication Communication > Pasteboard Manager
       Programming Guide
       Carbon > Interapplication Communication > Pasteboard Manager Reference

BUGS
       There is no way to tell pbpaste to get only a specified data type.

Apple Computer, Inc.           January 12, 2005                      PBCOPY(1)