Paste from system mac osx clipboard into terminal

Question

I'm trying to use python-markdown to convert the system clipboard contents into HTML by running a shell script after pressing a hotkey and sending the processed markdown to pbcopy . The following is the shell script to make this happen.

#!/bin/sh
echo `pbpaste` | python -m markdown | pbcopy

The issue already known is that pbpaste will not contain the systems clipboard contents. Is there a similar utility to pbpaste that stores the clipboard contents?

Answer 1

pbpaste should work for this. You can even specify the general clipboard to ensure you're getting the main system clipboard.

#!/bin/sh

pbpaste -pboard general | python -m markdown | pbcopy