How to send data to local clipboard from a remote SSH session

Question

Borderline ServerFault question, but I\'m programming some shell scripts, so I\'m trying here first :)

Most *nixes have a command that will let you pipe/red

Answer 1

This is my solution based on SSH reverse tunnel, netcat and xclip.

First create script (eg. clipboard-daemon.sh) on your workstation:

#!/bin/bash
HOST=127.0.0.1
PORT=3333

NUM=`netstat -tlpn 2>/dev/null | grep -c " ${HOST}:${PORT} "`
if [ $NUM -gt 0 ]; then
    exit
fi

while [ true ]; do
    nc -l ${HOST} ${PORT} | xclip -selection clipboard
done

and start it in background.

./clipboard-daemon.sh&

It will start nc piping output to xclip and respawning process after receiving portion of data

Then start ssh connection to remote host:

ssh user@host -R127.0.0.1:3333:127.0.0.1:3333

While logged in on remote box, try this:

echo "this is test" >/dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/3333

then try paste on your workstation

You can of course write wrapper script that starts clipboard-daemon.sh first and then ssh session. This is how it works for me. Enjoy.