Create a shortcut for a string that goes through a program

Question

I have to, a lot of times, get things onto the clipboard from the terminal. I do it like this:

echo "something"|xclip -selection clipboard

Doing this every time is way too lame, and I want to make a shortcut. How do I do it?

Answer 1

You could use alias. Add below line to ~/.bash_aliases.

alias my_alias_name="xclip -selection clipboard"

Then you go like this:

echo "something" | my_alias_name

You have to come up with good name for that on your own.

---

Answering your comment:

...the little script i could make is named cpstring and I go cpstring "anything". Is there a way to do this with bash scripting?

Create cpstring file, put it somewhere visible by your $PATH:

#!/bin/bash

echo "$@" | xclip -selection clipboard

Remember to add exe rights to that file: chmod +x cpstring

Answer 2

You could define a function:

clip() {
    echo "$@" | xclip -selection clipboard   
}

add it to your initialization script (~/.bashrc), then use it:

clip something
clip "one two"