Is there a Bash environment variable (say $CLIPBOARD
or similar) that contains the current contents of the clipboard?
The specific example is to see the top
I don't really know exactly what you are trying to accomplish. Check out the following article and see if it helps: Remotely transferring clipboard data using netcat and bash
Update: If you are using OSX, try using pbcopy & pbpaste to copy and paste data from the clipboard.
This requires an additional command-line utility, but it looks like what you describe:
Command Line to Clipboard
No, there isn't a bash environment variable. For your platform (which you don't specify) you may be able to use a command line tool like xclip or one of the many Windows utilities (google for "windows clipboard command line").
Using xclip combined with Readline bindings in Bash - a bit of a hack, but it works
http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/snipplets/xclip
You might look into xclip or pbcopy/pbpaste (Mac OS X).