Pipe to clipboard in bash on ubuntu

Say you wanted the output of a command like ls to be copied directly into the clipboard for pasting into your gui windows. Use xclip:

sudo apt-get install xclip

Then

ls | xclip -selection clipboard

will copy the output of ls into the clipboard.

I use an alias in my .bashrc for it:

alias c='xclip -selection clipboard'

So the command becomes:

ls | c

Quickly changing your .bashrc file

I use aliases all the time and am always adding more shortcuts for my terminal experience to the .bashrc file. So it's only natural that I made a convenient alias for doing exactly that.

Add this line to your .bashrc file:

alias vib='vi ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc'

Then type source ~/.bashrc and the change will have been made.

So whenever you want to change your .bashrc file and have it come into effect for the current terminal:

vib

which will edit .bashrc and will run source on it automatically when you finish editing.