Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Leopard Spots: Paste from Finder to Terminal

Actually, I don't know if this is a new Leopard thing or not, but it's massively useful. The other day, I needed to move some JAR files from one place to another, and I already had my trusty terminal window open on the destination directory. I wasn't sure which ones I needed in the giant pile in the source directory, so a wildcard expedition in Quicksilver didn't seem like the right way to go. So, I went to Finder and visually sighted the 4 files I needed. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just copy and paste them into the terminal? Why not try? So I did. Now, it didn't copy the files, but it did give me fully qualified path names to each of the files, separated with a space. A quick "cp" added to the front and an " ." added to the end, and they're copied. I don't know if Finder has always allowed you to copy and paste fully qualified file names, but it sure does now.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice find.

> but it sure does not.

should be:

but it sure does now.

Unknown said...

Didn't know that. Thx. Btw. I just tested it on Tiger and it works there too.

Anonymous said...

I only recently discovered this just like you did. It seems to work with Terminal or iTerm. I also checked it on Linux, and it seems to work as well for both GNOME and Xfce.

Unknown said...

As an alternative, you can also drag and drop a file or list of files to the Terminal window; the file names are pasted in just as if you had copy and pasted.

Unknown said...

You can also do something like

cp `pbcopy` .

Anonymous said...

You can also drag files from finder to the file upload fields in web forms in Safari. Somehow it just occurred to me the other day and I knew before I even had tried it that it will work.

Unknown said...

you could also access the clipboard from the commandline, using pbpaste and pbcopy.
e.g. Coping the current working directory to the clipboard:
% pwd | pbcopy

Anonymous said...

OSX continues to amaze me daily. I just want to give a BIG thank you to Gates co. for releasing Vista. If they hadn't dropped that steaming pile of code I would have never had the impetus to switch.