How might I pass text data from the ruby console into my clipboard without saving to a file?

Question

I'm trying to pass the array contained in a global variable I've created into my clipboard on my mac. It is very long so I don't want to highlight, copy & paste on my console. I want to use embedded unix code, specificially the `pbcopy` function for the mac laptop console that allows me to pass text into my computers clipboard, ready to paste. Were I to do this with a file-save, I'd do something like this (in ruby): ``` stringdata = “kflxkhdoudopudpdpudpudpyddoyod” File.open("temp.txt"){|f| f.write(stringdata)} `cat temp.txt | pbcopy` ``` But could I possibly do this without creating a temporary file? I'm sure this is possible. All things in text are possible. Thanks in advance for the solution

Accepted Answer

You can just echo it instead if there are no newline characters in the string; otherwise, use the `IO` class.

Using `echo`:

```
system "echo #{stringdata} | pbcopy"
```

OR

```
`echo #{stringdata} | pbcopy`
```

Ruby will then just rip the text from memory, inject it into the shell command which opens a pipe between the `echo` and `pbcopy` processes.

Using the `IO` class:

If you want to do it the Ruby way, we simply create a pipe with `pbcopy` using the IO class. This creates a shared files between the processes which we write to, and `pbcopy` will read from.

`IO.popen("pbcopy", "w") { |pipe| pipe.puts "Hello world!" }`

How might I pass text data from the ruby console into my clipboard without saving to a file?

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