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headbirth · Jul 22, 2009, 08:57 AM

Does anyone know of a commandline tool or method for generating clipping files. I ran across this one for creating url clippings (http://derailer.org/iloc/), but nothing on text or image clippings. I know the information is stored in the resource fork, but is it encoded?

Anyone have a shell script to pipe the clipboard into a clipping file?

Thanks

ibook_steve · Jul 22, 2009, 01:17 PM

Can't you just do drag and drop?

Or are you trying to script this with other actions?

Steve

besson3c · Jul 22, 2009, 03:51 PM

This would be an Applescript thing, a shell script knows nothing about the GUI environment, including your clipboard contents.

headbirth · Jul 22, 2009, 04:48 PM

I'm looking to do this in a shell script. This is definitely a shell script thing rather than Applescript. The shell script knows quit a bit about the clipboard and forget the GUI...

besson3c · Jul 22, 2009, 05:23 PM

Are you sure about that? There might be some sort of OS X binary you can invoke to paste from the clipboard from within your script, but the bash/tcsh/sh/etc. shell script language itself knows nothing about the GUI environment it runs in - it is platform agnostic.

OreoCookie · Jul 22, 2009, 05:58 PM

You don't need a GUI to run an AppleScript. And besides, to my knowledge (without combining it with an AppleScript), I'm fairly certain you cannot access the clipboard with a shell script.

BLAZE_MkIV · Jul 22, 2009, 07:35 PM

Don't forget you can run applescripts from the command line.

Chuckit · Jul 22, 2009, 08:03 PM

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

And besides, to my knowledge (without combining it with an AppleScript), I'm fairly certain you cannot access the clipboard with a shell script.

You can access the clipboard with the pbcopy and pbpaste tools. For example, printf "Whoa" | pbcopy will copy "Whoa" to the clipboard, and pbpaste | wc will do a word count on the contents of the clipboard.

I'm not aware of any way to make a clipping, though.

besson3c · Jul 22, 2009, 08:40 PM

Don't know why you'd need a clipping, you could always do a pbpaste > /your/file.txt and get something you could easily Quickview. Then again, the original poster hasn't really shared much in terms of what exactly he's/she's trying to accomplish, so I don't even know if this would be a viable alternative.

CharlesS · Jul 22, 2009, 08:46 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

Don't know why you'd need a clipping, you could always do a pbpaste > /your/file.txt and get something you could easily Quickview.

Indeed. It is utterly obnoxious that text clippings can't be viewed via QuickLook.

besson3c · Jul 22, 2009, 08:51 PM

Yeah, QuickLook not Quickview... sorry!

I wouldn't be surprised if text clippings are just text files with a certain file extension and Apple has built something into the OS to support them for legacy purposes. I never did see the point of text clippings anyway.

TETENAL · Jul 23, 2009, 02:13 AM

The advantage of clippings is that they can hold multiple flavours of the data and just like with the pasteboard or drag & drop the receiving application can pick the best flavour when receiving (Photoshop might pick PICT-data, BBEdit text-data).

Sometimes this is immensely useful, sometimes it's not what you want.

Chuckit · Jul 23, 2009, 02:28 AM

Originally Posted by besson3c

I wouldn't be surprised if text clippings are just text files with a certain file extension and Apple has built something into the OS to support them for legacy purposes.

I think you'll find that's not the case if you open one in TextEdit.

OreoCookie · Jul 23, 2009, 03:47 AM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

You can access the clipboard with the pbcopy and pbpaste tools. For example, printf "Whoa" | pbcopy will copy "Whoa" to the clipboard, and pbpaste | wc will do a word count on the contents of the clipboard.

Cool, didn't know that, learnt something today. I can't seem to paste anything other than text, though.

Chuckit · Jul 23, 2009, 03:52 AM

Yeah, they can only work with text, RTF and EPS.