Redirecting Command Prompt Output to the Windows Clipboard

This week, a coworker gave me this really handy tip. If you do a lot of command line work in Windows, this tip will let you pipe the output of a command line program into the Windows Clipboard. You can then use Windows paste feature to paste the output into Notepad or anywhere else that takes a normal text paste.

Redirecting the command and it’s output is as easy as this:

[command and switches]| clip

So maybe you want all the output of “ipconfig /all”

You would enter this on your command line:

ipconfig /all | clip

This works for other commands too. “Dir | clip” is handy for getting a copy of all the contents in a directory. All of the results of ipconfig get piped into the clipboard, which can then be pasted with a CTRL-V. Sweet! This works in Windows 2003 and higher (no Windows XP). I tested it in Windows 7 and it works there as well.

Tip originally came from: thebackroomtech.com


This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Utility, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Redirecting Command Prompt Output to the Windows Clipboard”

  1. wow, on May 8th, 2009 at 3:07 pm Said:

    wow, seriously that is a lot more work. Just right click, click mark, and select what you want then hit enter. was that so hard?

  2. admin, on May 8th, 2009 at 3:17 pm Said:

    No, not hard. Different.

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