In day-to-day life as an administrator, it is very common to copy and paste text between files, editors, etc. There are a few features built into Windows and Powershell that can help make the copy pasta process easier.
The “clip” utility is a tool that has been built into Windows for a while now (I think since Windows 7), which allows you to redirect command output to the Windows system clipboard. Pairing the clip tool with the capabilities of Powershell piping and you have a very nice way of getting text out of the shell and into a text editor, or wherever else you may want.
The following commands are simple and quick examples of how to pipe output text of a Powershell command to the clipboard. You can use this method to output text from a file or from another Powershell command.
cat <file> | clip Get-NetAdapater | clip
Then just hit CTRL+V in notepad (or your favorite text tool) and you will have the output of the previously clipped command. In the above example, cat is just an alias for Get-Content in Powershell, carried over from the Linux and Unix shells. Use the Get-Alias command to find at all of the various shortcuts for Powershell commands.
I tend to grab text out of files quite often, so writing out text to the clipboard and pasting elsewhere has saved me countless hours over the years of clicking around in GUI’s with a few keystrokes. Shortcuts like this are often missed or over looked by admins that are used to point and clicking, so make sure you try it out if you haven’t discovered this trick.
