pipe output of a command to your clipboard

A shorter alternative would be xclip: some command | xclip which does the exact same thing.

On Darwin, you can do this: some command | pbcopy

In OSX, pipe to pbcopy and paste from pbpaste

Guess I should have read isaacs comment before posting!!

xclip and xsel are available as packages of the same names at least under Debian/Ubuntu. They are not installed by default.

"In turn you can get the contents of your clipboard by typing xsel by itself with no arguments" -- that's wrong. That'll give you the contents of the X selection, not the clipboard which was set by the command above it. And spatz's comment is also incorrect -- his command will set the X selection, not the X clipboard as in the command he's replying to. I'll explain: xsel and xclip do pretty much the same things, but xsel is a little more advanced and has a nicer syntax. It's important to realize that the X selection (there are two of these -- primary and secondary, but no-one really uses the secondary) is different from the X clipboard. The (primary) X selection is what is set when some text is selected and is usually retrieved when the middle mouse button is clicked. The X selection is usually cleared when the program which set it exits. The X clipboard is what most programs write to and read from when the cut/copy/paste commands are used. It isn't wiped when the program exits. So this is what to use if you want to do a control-v somewhere rather than a middle click. Both xsel and xclip use the primary X selection by default. To set it some command | xsel or some command | xclip To retrieve it xsel (xsel detects what stdin and stdout are, and picks input or output automatically. See its manpage.) or xclip -o To set the X clipboard some command | xsel -b or some command | xclip -selection clipboard And to retrieve it xsel -b or xclip -selection clipboard -o In vim you can read and write to both of these by using the "+ (X clipboard) and "* (X selection) registers. For example, to copy the current line to the X clipboard, type "+yy To paste from X selection, type "*p