First install a 16 kB program called xclip : sudo apt-get install xclip You can then pipe the output into xclip to be copied into the clipboard: cat file | xclip To paste the text you just copied, you shall use: xclip -o To simplify life, you can set up an alias in your .bashrc file as I did: alias "c=xclip" alias "v=xclip -o" To see how useful this is, imagine I want to open my current path in a new terminal window (there may be other ways of doing it like Ctrl + T on some systems, but this is just for illustration purposes): Terminal 1: pwd | c Terminal 2: cd `v` Notice the ` ` around v . This executes v as a command first and then substitutes it in-place for cd to use. Only copy the content to the X clipboard cat file | xclip If you want to paste somewhere else other than a X application, try this one: cat file | xclip -selection clipboard