{"id":14513,"date":"2026-08-12T02:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.both.org\/?p=14513"},"modified":"2026-08-12T02:26:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T06:26:37","slug":"copy-data-to-your-clipboard-from-a-terminal-with-wl-copy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.both.org\/?p=14513","title":{"rendered":"Copy data to your clipboard from a terminal with wl-copy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When you spend a lot of time in a Linux terminal, it can become laborious to take your hand off the keyboard to grab the mouse. The habit of selecting text, right-clicking (or pressing keys) to copy, and then right-clicking (or pressing keys) to paste is a strong one, and it seems there’s always something that needs copying and pasting. Thanks to the wl-copy<\/code> command, you can now copy things to your system clipboard, right from your Linux terminal, without using your mouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is wl-copy?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The wl-copy<\/code> command is part of the wl-clipboard<\/code> package, which is a utility for the Wayland graphics server. Wayland is the layer on the Linux operating system that provides everything you see on your screen after you’ve logged in to a system. The wl-clipboard<\/code> package contains both wl-copy<\/code> for copying and wl-paste<\/code> for pasting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Install wl-clipboard<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To make the wl-copy<\/code> (and wl-paste<\/code>) command available on your system, you must install the wl-clipboard<\/code> software package. Before doing that, however, you must confirm that you’re running Wayland and not its predecessor, X11. You can do this by verifying that echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE<\/code> returns wayland<\/code>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE\nwayland<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
As long as you get wayland<\/code> back from that command, then you can use wl-copy<\/code> and wl-paste<\/code>. On Fedora and other RPM-based Linux distributions (such as CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, and OpenMandriva), you use dnf<\/code> package manager:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
sudo dnf install wl-clipboard<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
On Debian and Debian-based distributions, you use the apt<\/code> command:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
sudo apt install wl-clipboard<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Using wl-copy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Once it’s been installed, you can use the wl-copy<\/code> command to copy data to your clipboard. Anything you copy to your system clipboard is available everywhere on your system. You can copy data from one file from a terminal, without ever opening that file in a window of its own, and then paste that data into another application or into another file. That doesn’t mean that wl-copy<\/code> is the only way to do that, but for now suppose that’s the workflow you need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To copy an arbitrary string to your clipboard using wl-copy<\/code>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$ wl-copy \"hello world\"<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The string “hello world” is now in your system clipboard. You can navigate to any other window on your desktop, right-click and select Paste<\/strong> (or press Ctrl+V<\/strong>), and you’ll get “hello world” pasted from your clipboard. Alternately, you can just press Ctrl+Shift+V<\/strong> in your terminal to paste the string there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Copy command output with wl-copy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This can be useful in shell scripts, for example, where you’re generating output with the expectation that the output is meant to be inserted somewhere else on the system. Suppose your workplace uses two-factor authentication, and you prefer to use a command (rather than a hardware key, or a smart phone app), like pass otp<\/code> to generate tokens. When the pass otp<\/code> command outputs a token, you’d normally have to select it and copy it with a mouse before you could paste it into the login screen of your workplace intranet. With wl-copy<\/code>, however, you can send the output directly to your system clipboard instead:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$ pass otp example.com | wl-copy<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Copy data from a file with wl-copy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
You can also copy the contents of a file using the wl-copy<\/code> command so you don’t have to launch a separate application just to access a file’s contents. Of course, you’re still technically “opening” the file that you’re copying, but wl-copy<\/code> does that part, invisibly, for you. Using your terminal, you can redirect the contents of a file into wl-copy<\/code>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$ wl-copy < example.txt<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Here’s an example, creating a simple file using echo<\/code>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$ echo \"This is example text.\" > example.txt\n$ wl-copy < example.txt\n$ wl-paste\nThis is example text.<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
It doesn’t have to be just text. You can copy any kind of data. For example, you can copy a JPEG image:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$ wl-copy < example.jpg<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
You could then paste the image into an application, like GIMP or LibreOffice, that can accept images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Copying text in a terminal on X11<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The wl-copy<\/code> command is essentially the modern equivalent of the xclip<\/code> command for the X11 graphic server. If you’re still running X11, you can use xclip<\/code> instead. The syntax is a little different, but the concept is the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To copy an arbitrary string to your clipboard using xclip<\/code>, you must pipe data to it and use the -i<\/code> option to read from standard input:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$ echo \"hello world\" | xclip -i<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
To copy the contents of a file, you can redirect:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$ xclip -i < example.txt<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
To paste from your clipboard, use the -o<\/code> option:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$ xclip -o\nhello world<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Copying from the terminal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes wl-copy<\/code> is surplus to requirements. If you just need to copy text quickly from a terminal and then back into it, then Bash has built-in functions (like Ctrl+K<\/strong> and Ctrl-W<\/strong> and Alt+D<\/strong>) to copy text and then to “yank” it back again (Ctrl+Y<\/strong>). But when you want to get data from within a terminal and then paste it somewhere else, wl-copy<\/code> is a real convenience. The wl-copy<\/code> (or xclip<\/code>) command can save you several clicks and seconds of launch times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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