pbcopy is a very convenient command to copy text to the clipboard on macOS, but it is not available in Linux, making it inconvenient to copy text from remote servers to the local clipboard, like:

$ cat tmp.txt | pbcopy

With the OSC 52 escape sequence, we can copy text to the local clipboard in SSH sessions. Just add this to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

pbcopy () {
    if [ $# -gt 0 ]
    then
        data="$*"
    else
        data="$(cat)"
    fi
    encoded=$(printf '%s' "$data" | base64)
    if [ -n "$TMUX" ]
    then
        printf '\033Ptmux;\033\033]52;c;%s\a\033\\' "$encoded" > /dev/tty
    else
        printf '\033]52;c;%s\a' "$encoded" > /dev/tty
    fi
}

This works as long as your terminal supports OSC 52.

To let this work in Tmux, you need to add the following to ~/.tmux.conf:

set-option -g allow-passthrough on

References:

• tty-copy