mjhjmtu

Here's my usage case:

• I'm often connected to other computers over SSH for work and I often need to copy and paste documents/text from the server to locally running editors for writing examples and sharing text.


• Often, if the text is small enough, I'll simply copy the output from my terminal program (gnome-terminal at the moment) and paste it.


• However, when it comes to entire documents, my options are quite limited. I can either copy the document chunk-by-chunk, or scp it to the local machine.

Is there a way to use a program such as xclip which will allow me to copy remote stdin to the local X server's clipboard? Something to the effect of:

cat myconffile.conf | sed ... | copy-over-ssh-to-local-clipboard

would be awesome. Does something exist to make this possible?

If you run ssh with X forwarding, this is transparent: remote commands (including xclip) have access to your X server (including its keyboard). Make sure you have ForwardX11 yes in your ~/.ssh/config and X11Forwarding yes in the server sshd_config (depending on your distributions, these options may be on or off by default).

<myconffile.conf sed ... | xclip -i

There are other ways of working on remote files that may be more convenient, for example mounting remote directories on your local machine with SSHfs, or opening remote files in Emacs with Tramp. If you have ssh and FUSE set up and SSHfs installed, SSHfs is as easy as mkdir ~/net/myserver; sshfs myserver:/ ~/net/myserver. If you have ssh set up and Emacs installed, Tramp is as easy as opening /myserver:/path/to/file.

You don't need anything special; since xclip works over stdin, just

ssh remotehost xclip < myconf.conf

Why would it need to be modified with sed? ssh is transparent to data when not used as a terminal, and is commonly used in pipelines such as

tar cfz - somedir | ssh remotehost 'cd destdir; tar xfz -'`

Here's how you would do it on OSX from your local machine

ssh remotehost.com "<some/file.txt" | pbcopy

if your local machine is running windows(7+) you can just use this from the CommandLine:

ssh user@server cat /home/user/file | clip

~/.ssh/config:

Host REMOTEHOST
 ...
 ForwardX11 yes

/etc/ssh/sshd_config:

X11Forwarding yes

bash:

$ xclip -o | ssh REMOTEHOST 'DISPLAY=:0 xclip -i'

I have similar issue with LUbuntu's lxterminal (tested various terminals) pasting clipboard to an ssh session. If clipboard has more than about 100 bytes the session timeouts and fails.

If I connect via ssh to almost any CentOS 5.x server and then connect to the target server, clipboard paste works without any issue for any reasonable data size.

Very similar to @d-raev's and @william-casarin solutions, however, it is different so I'm sharing what worked for me.

The command:

ssh user@host cat <myconffile.conf | xclip -sel clip

Explanation:

This is using ssh to create a secure tunnel, login to user @ host or ip, then execute cat to print the contents of <myconffile.conf to stdout then piping that to the command xclip -sel clip on your local machine, which places the contents of <myconffile.conf into the clipboard on your local machine.

Real-world example usage:

I use this command structure for tasks such as pasting ssh keys into github (allowing a simple ctrl-V or paste selection after I run the command) on with Bash on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. Check out man ssh, man cat, and man xclip for behavior and option details.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Base64

You can convert your clipboard data with Base64 to ASCII text. Then you can push that through inside an already existing SSH connection.