Copy Files From Ubuntu CLI; Paste in File Manager

Shout out to Stéphane Chazelas and his answer to the Unix Stackexchange question “Copying files from command line to clipboard”.

They gave me a major big-brain moment, and through his answer I learned that there are 3 different kinds of clipboards in X11, and also that there are target on copied values that allow applications to extract only the copied values that are compatible with itself.

Concept: Copying a File

Note: I only just tested this with nautilus the default file manager on Ubuntu.

Copying files in the default file manager usually involves writing the absolute path of the file to the clipboard with a specific format and to a specific target atom.

For ubuntu, the format is the following:

copy
file://[file path 1]
file://[file path 2]
file://[file path 3]

Note: The file:// part, effectively turning this into a proper URI is important.

The target is …

x-special/gnome-copied-files

Copying From The CLI

To achieve this, we will first install a cli utility that allows for messing around with the clipboards. It’s called xclip

sudo apt install xclip

Say to copy the file with the path /tmp/tomato.txt, we must then first create the format that the system expects.

printf "copy\nfile:///tmp/tomato.txt\0"

Note: The \0 at the end there, removes all ambiguity as to where the file paths end.

We must then pipe the output of this printf command, to xclip with the proper target atom selected.

printf "copy\nfile:///tmp/tomato.txt\0" | \
    xclip -i -selection clipboard -t x-special/gnome-copied-files

and done! You can now paste in your file manager.