Command Prompt and the Clipboard

Filed under “I didn’t know you could do that”.

Something I discovered recently I thought it was one of those things I’d just missed over the years but after a conversation I had in the office I thought it might be worth sharing here too.

Normally when working with the command prompt if you want to copy some output you have to switch from the keyboard to the mouse.

Which is fine, but if you’re working with the keyboard (because you know, command prompt!) switching between that and the mouse can break your flow, well it does for me.

Turns out you can redirect output straight to the clipboard by piping to clip.exe

e.g

Ping google.com | clip

The output goes to the clipboard ready for pasting elsewhere.

This is also particularly useful if the output is long and topamax fills the visible area of the screen.

This is the output from “DriverQuery”, you’d have hard time copying all of that with the mouse

Useful thing to know!

This works in PowerShell too and it’s where I use it most.

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Andy Parkes

Andy Parkes is Technical Director at Coventry based IT support company IBIT Solutions. He is also Microsoft Partner Area Lead for 2012-2013 and coordinates AMITPRO which is a peer group for IT Professionals in the Midlands area. He also isn't a fan of describing himself in the third person.

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