Copy and Paste with Clipboard from PowerShell

Many times I want to use PowerShell to manipulate some text that I have in something else like email or a text editor or some such or conversely, I do something at the command line and I want to paste the output into a document of some kind.

I’m not sure why there is no cmdlet for outputting to clipboard.

PS> get-command out-*

CommandType     Name             Definition                                         
-----------     ----             ----------                                         
Cmdlet          Out-Default      Out-Default [-InputObject <PSObject>] [-Verbose]...
Cmdlet          Out-File         Out-File [-FilePath] <String> [[-Encoding] <Stri...
Cmdlet          Out-GridView     Out-GridView [-InputObject <PSObject>] [-Title <...
Cmdlet          Out-Host         Out-Host [-Paging] [-InputObject <PSObject>] [-V...
Cmdlet          Out-Null         Out-Null [-InputObject <PSObject>] [-Verbose] [-...
Cmdlet          Out-Printer      Out-Printer [[-Name] <String>] [-InputObject <PS...
Cmdlet          Out-String       Out-String [-Stream] [-Width <Int32>] [-InputObj...

Fortunately, though Windows ships with a native clip.exe for piping text to clipboard. You can alias it to out-clipboard or just pipe to “clip”.

new-alias  Out-Clipboard $env:SystemRoot\system32\clip.exe

Now you can just pipe to Out-Clipboard or clip just like the other Out-* cmdlets.

The larger issue is that PowerShell doesn’t expose a way to paste text from the clipboard. However, the WinForms API of the .NET Framework has a GetText() static method on the System.Windows.Forms.Clipboard class. There is a catch, though:

The Clipboard class can only be used in threads set to single thread apartment (STA) mode. To use this class, ensure that your Main method is marked with the STAThreadAttribute attribute.

This is unfortunate because PowerShell runs in a multithreaded apartment by default which means that the workaround is to spin up a new PowerShell process which is slow.

function Get-ClipboardText()
{
	$command =
	{
	    add-type -an system.windows.forms
	    [System.Windows.Forms.Clipboard]::GetText()
	}
	powershell -sta -noprofile -command $command
}

A slightly less obvious approach is to paste the text from the clipboard into a non-visual instance of the System.Windows.Forms.Textbox control and then emit the text of the control to the console. This works fine in a standard PowerShell process and is substantially faster than spinning up a new process.

function Get-ClipboardText()
{
	Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
	$tb = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
	$tb.Multiline = $true
	$tb.Paste()
	$tb.Text
}

The TextBox method is about 500 times faster than the sub-process method. On my system, it takes 0.501 seconds to do spin up the sub-process and emit the text from the clipboard versus 0.001 seconds to use the TextBox control in the current process.

I also alias this function to “paste”. The commands I actually type and remember are “clip” and “paste”.

When using paste, I generally am setting a variable or inserting my pasted text into a pipeline within parens.

CAVEAT: Whenever you capture a value without any {CR}{LF}, the clipboard will add it. You may need to trim the newline to get the behavior you expect when pasting into a pipeline.

Here’s some one-liners to illustrate. I have dig from BIND in my path and I have Select-String aliased to grep. Notice how when I paste the IP address I captured to the clipboard from the one-liner gets pasted back with an extra blank line.

PS> ((dig google.com) | grep '^google\.com') -match '(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)$' | out-null; $matches[0]
72.14.235.104
PS> ((dig google.com) | grep '^google\.com') -match '(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)$' | out-null; $matches[0] | clip
PS> paste
72.14.235.104

PS> ping (paste)
Ping request could not find host 72.14.235.104
. Please check the name and try again.
PS> ping (paste).trim()

Pinging 72.14.235.104 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 72.14.235.104: bytes=32 time=192ms TTL=51
Reply from 72.14.235.104: bytes=32 time=208ms TTL=51
Reply from 72.14.235.104: bytes=32 time=212ms TTL=51
Reply from 72.14.235.104: bytes=32 time=210ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 72.14.235.104:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 192ms, Maximum = 212ms, Average = 205ms