Share via

clip it

  • Article

In PowerShell I ran (dir *.exe).Count to see the number of executables in System32 folder in a Vista box and it prompty returned 401. So there are 401 executables and most of us are unaware of most of them.

Recently I wanted to copy the output of a console application to the clip board. I was on the verge of writing a program to do just that when I reminded myself of the programmers disease. After a bit of digging around I found the neat little clip.exe in the system32 folder.

 d:\prithvi\Setup>clip /?

CLIP

Description:
    Redirects output of command line tools to the Windows clipboard.
    This text output can then be pasted into other programs.

Parameter List:
    /?                  Displays this help message.

Examples:
    DIR | CLIP          Places a copy of the current directory
                        listing into the Windows clipboard.

    CLIP < README.TXT   Places a copy of the text from readme.txt
                        on to the Windows clipboard.

So clip does what I was exactly looking for. Its a neat tool and I have grown fond of it. Guess how I pasted the output above. I ran clip /? | clip :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2006
    I wish I had known about that a long time ago! It looks like it is/was part of the Resource Kit Tools for Windows Server 2000 or NT somewhere, so it doesn't look like it comes with a Windows XP Professional installation (as far as I could tell). After some searching online, I stumbled across a link to this Microsoft FTP site: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Services/TechNet/samples/ps/win98/reskit/file/. clip.exe can be downloaded from there.
  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2006
    There is a copy of clip.exe here:http://www.petri.co.il/software/clip.zipThis article links it:http://www.petri.co.il/quickly_copy_error_and_display_messages.htm
  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2007
    Hi,I'm looking for the complement of clip.  In other words, a command which pastes the contents of the clipboard to the command prompt.  I know I can do this using the right mouse button but I would like a way to do it without using the mouse.-Michaelmzand@hotmail.com
  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2007
    @Michael Zand:To paste the clipboard contents to a cmd.exe window using only the keyboard, try:  Alt+Space, e, p.  (Alt+Space opens the window's Titlebar menu, e for Edit, p for Paste.)  Not terribly elegant, but it works!