For a long time, I have relied on the Cygwin environment to emulate a Unix-like
experience on Windows. Cygwin provides not only some common Unixy
command line utilities but also a Linux-like file system hierarchy that
includes /dev
and /proc
. For example, copying
a CD-ROM is simply cat /dev/cdrom >file.iso
One of the special files in /dev
is
/dev/clipboard
, which allows you to read and update the
Windows clipboard as if it were a local file. Many of my workflows
include /dev/clipboard
. A concrete example is copying a
column in Excel, transforming it in the command line, and pasting it
back.
# View the clipboard
cat /dev/clipboard
# Find something on the clipboard
cat /dev/clipboard |grep something
# Transform the clipboard data in-place
cat /dev/clipboard |sed ... |tee /dev/clipboard
And many of my scripts take /dev/clipboard
as the
input/output, such as launching Google to search the clipboard.
AFAIK, this thing hasn’t been replicated on Linux. Maybe someone could implement it with FUSE.