linuxclipboardpipingxclip

Avoid "enter" when pasting xsel / xclip


This is somewhat simple, I presume, but still I cannot figure out how to do it. I have the following function defined:

date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M | xclip -selection c

which gets a timestamp and puts it into the clipboard. I mainly want to use this to name files, so I can, for example, go

vi file_2016-02-16_20:10_somemorethings.txt

but when I paste the date in the terminal (with control+shift+V) it already enters the command, so I never get the chance to type _somemorethings.txt. In other words, the last character that xclip saves is the Enter key. This happens everytime I pipe something to xclip or xsel, not only with the function defined above.

I know this sounds like something unimportant, but it would really improve productivity is this little issue could be fixed.

I have tried several options with both xclip and xsel and nothing seems to overcome this. Any ideas? Is this even possible?


Solution

  • You could use tr, for example

    date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M | tr -d '\n' | xclip -selection c 
    

    See this question for different ways to achieve it: Bash: Strip trailing linebreak from output