fclip is a command-line clipboard for the filesystem. It allows to use a terminal to manipulate files much like in a GUI file manager, but in a more powerful and versatile way. It runs on Linux systems with the D-Bus message bus.

Build fclip using make. fclip requires dbus-c++, boost_system, boost_filesystem and boost_program_options.

fclip consists of two components:

• the command-line utility, fclip,
• the server, fclip-server.

Each user wanting to use the command-line utility needs to have his own copy of the server running. You will probably want to configure the server to start when you log in. fclip also requires a D-Bus user message bus.

This is a brief introduction to using fclip. You can also read the manual.

fclip doesn't store entire files, just file paths. The paths remain in the clipboard until they are removed.

Use fclip add to add files (file paths) to the clipboard:

$ fclip add index.html
$ cd ~/Pictures
$ fclip add kittens/*.jpg

Use fclip rm to un-add files:

$ fclip rm kittens/ugly_kitten.jpg

fclip each performs an action on each of the files in the clipboard. Use the -p option to print their paths:

$ fclip each -p
/home/cifka/bordel/index.html
/home/cifka/Pictures/kittens/black_kitten.jpg
/home/cifka/Pictures/kittens/white_kitten.jpg
/home/cifka/Pictures/kittens/some_other_kitten.jpg

Use -c to run a given command ({} gets replaced by each of the file paths):

$ fclip each -c 'cp {} ~/public_html'
# ~/public_html now contains index.html and some .jpg files

You can supply a directory path to fclip each in order to only process files under that directory:

$ fclip each ~/Pictures -p
kittens/black_kitten.jpg
kittens/white_kitten.jpg
kittens/some_other_kitten.jpg

Clear the clipboard with fclip clear. To get an overview of the clipboard's contents, use fclip status.

To get help about individual commands and their options, run fclip help [<command>].

If you want a clean clipboard but have some files in it that you want to use later, you can stash them away for a while using fclip stash. Restore them using fclip stash pop or get rid of them using fclip stash drop.

If you do fclip stash multiple times (without doing pop or drop), your stashes will be stored in a stack. To see the stashes you've stored, use fclip stash list or fclip stash ls:

$ fclip stash ls
  #0: /home/cifka
  #1: /usr/local/bin

Each stash has a number that you can supply to fclip stash pop or fclip stash drop to restore or remove it. If no number is provided, the topmost stash (#0) is chosen.