Save Clipboard History in Just 30 Lines of Code

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   Cover Image by Luba Ertel

In daily work or life, copy and paste are highly used. Sometimes you suddenly need the content you copied before, and it would be convenient if you have the history for reading and searching.

A simple shell script can do that!

When the script runs in background, it reads the clipboard every 2 seconds, compare the local saved record content, append current clipboard content the end of file if it has not been saved.

Files are named with dates (can easily modified it in the followed script, see OUTPUT_FILE) for easy storage and archiving.

Implementation

Create a clipboard.sh script file

clipboard.sh

#!/bin/bash

DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

OUTPUT_FILE=~/Documents/$DATE.txt

if [ ! -f "$OUTPUT_FILE" ]; then
  touch "$OUTPUT_FILE"
fi

while true; do

  CURRENT_DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
  if [ "$DATE" != "$CURRENT_DATE" ]; then
    DATE=$CURRENT_DATE
    OUTPUT_FILE=~/Documents/$DATE.txt
  fi

  if [ ! -f "$OUTPUT_FILE" ]; then
    touch "$OUTPUT_FILE"
  fi

  CLIPBOARD_CONTENT=$(pbpaste)

  if ! grep -Fxq "$CLIPBOARD_CONTENT" "$OUTPUT_FILE"; then

    echo -e "$CLIPBOARD_CONTENT\n" >>"$OUTPUT_FILE"

  fi

  sleep 2
done

Give executable permissions to clipboard.sh

chmod +x clipboard.sh

Run

./clipboard.sh

Read

You can use Shell or an editor (such as VS Code) to view the document contents saved by the script.

tail

tail -f ~/Documents/2024-09-03.txt

Related software recommendations

There are already some very useful clipboard history plugins on the market.

Raycast

PasteNow

The pro version of PasteNow supports iCloud synchronization, which is more user-friendly for viewing history across devices.