xclip
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Command line interface to the X11 clipboard
xclip -c < secret.txt xclip -c -o -T
Summary
xclip is an open-source command-line utility that gives shell scripts and terminal users access to the X11 clipboard, reading from stdin or a file and writing to or reading from the primary, secondary, or clipboard X selections. It runs as a small command-line tool rather than a GUIGUIA graphical user interface, controls such as windows, buttons and menus. It lets people use software visually rather than entering commands. applet, invoked directly or piped into other commands, which makes it a fit for Linux users automating copy-paste tasks or scripting clipboard interaction from shell pipelines. It sits in the category of X11 desktop utilities alongside things like xdotool, doing one narrow job rather than bundling clipboard management features. First committed in 2007 with 17 contributors, it has had no commits in the past year, so it should be treated as stable but no longer actively maintained.
Command line interface to the X11 clipboard
How xclip helps
How do I get command output into another program's paste buffer without a temp file?
pipes standard input straight into the primary, secondary, or clipboard X selection so the next paste anywhere picks it up
How do I pull what's on the clipboard into a script or a file?
prints the contents of the chosen X selection to standard out, ready to redirect into a file or feed to another command
How do I get a large file's contents into an application that only accepts pasted text?
reads the file directly and loads it into an X selection, avoiding manual copy from an editor or terminal
How do I move the primary selection into the clipboard selection so a keyboard paste works?
reads from the primary selection with output mode and writes it back in through input mode targeted at the clipboard selection
How do I hand a file to another machine or directory using only the clipboard mechanism, not scp or cp?
the companion copy, paste, and cut file commands wrap the same X selection mechanism to transfer whole files and directory trees between X sessions, preserving path structure when asked
How do I copy a block of text out of an editor buffer without touching the mouse?
invoked from within the editor's command mode as a filter over the selected lines, it takes them on standard input and places them into the primary selection
Languages
Command line
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Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for xclip, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail xclip puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
1 entry
No entries match these filters.
- October 20261
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in astrand/xclip, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 0 −3 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 196 days first maintainer reply 14 hours
- Open backlog 73 of 114 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 73
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 1,325
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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