New Stuff - Get-Clipboard And Set-Clipboard - New In PowerShell 5.0
Predictably, there are lots of new cmdlets coming in PowerShell/Windows Management Framework 5.0. Two of them that just came out in build 10105 are the Get-Clipboard and Set-Clipboard cmdlets. The help docs aren’t all written at the time I’m writing this post but I wanted to introduce them and highlight a couple neat use cases I immediately thought of.
[caption id=”attachment_211” align=”alignnone” width=”1122”]
New Get-Clipboard and Set-Clipboard cmdlets (click for larger)[/caption]
Back in the old days of PowerShell 4.0, you had to pipe output to clip.exe or use the PowerShell Community Extensions to interact with your clipboard. Not anymore!
Looking at the Get-Clipboard syntax, it’s quickly apparent that you can do more than just get the clipboard’s text content but let’s start with that anyway. So, what if I go and select some text, right click and copy it. What can I do with the Get-Clipboard cmdlet?
PS C:\> Get-Clipboard
I copied this text to my clipboard.
Not exactly mind blowing. Similarly, you can use the Set-Clipboard cmdlet to put text on the clipboard.
PS C:\> "This text was put on the clipboard using new cmdlets." | Set-Clipboard
PS C:\> Get-Clipboard
This text was put on the clipboard using new cmdlets.
I’m probably not blowing your mind with this one either. Where this gets fun is when you consider the possibilities the using the -Format parameter. I can put more than just text on my clipboard, right? Let’s see what I get when I copy three files in my c:\temp directory to my clipboard. If I try to just use Get-Clipboard without any additional parameters or info like I did in the above examples, I won’t get anything returned, but what I can do is this.
PS C:\> Get-Clipboard -Format FileDropList
Directory: C:\temp
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
-a---- 5/1/2015 8:02 AM 30 file1.txt
-a---- 5/1/2015 8:02 AM 18 file2.txt
-a---- 5/1/2015 8:02 AM 11 file3.txt
Now we’re doing cool things. And what kind of objects are these?
PS C:\> (Get-Clipboard -Format FileDropList)[0].GetType()
IsPublic IsSerial Name BaseType
-------- -------- ---- --------
True True FileInfo System.IO.FileSystemInfo
FileInfo! We can do all the same things with this array of files that we would do to the results of a Get-ChildItem command. This means we can go the other way too and use the Set-Clipboard cmdlet to put a bunch of files onto the clipboard.
PS C:\> Get-ChildItem c:\temp\file*.txt | Set-Clipboard
PS C:\> Get-Clipboard -Format FileDropList
Directory: C:\temp
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
-a---- 5/1/2015 8:02 AM 30 file1.txt
-a---- 5/1/2015 8:02 AM 18 file2.txt
-a---- 5/1/2015 8:02 AM 11 file3.txt
Note with all of the above examples, you can use the -Append parameter to simply add on to whatever is already on the clipboard.
I won’t cover the other formats (Image and Audio) or the text format types because you need something to discover for yourself. The last thing I’ll point out is that you can easily clear the clipboard, too.
PS C:\> $null | Set-Clipboard
PS C:\> Get-Clipboard
PS C:\>
I’m not going to cover every new cmdlet that comes out with PowerShell 5.0 but this one is very accessible and I think I’ll be able to use it all over the place.