‘Holy crap I didn’t know that was there’ feature of the day:

PBCOPY(1)                                                            PBCOPY(1)
NAME
       pbcopy, pbpaste - provide copying and pasting from command line
SYNOPSIS
       pbcopy [-help] [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}]
       pbpaste  [-help]  [-pboard  {general  |  ruler | find | font}] [-Prefer
       {ascii | rtf | ps}]
DESCRIPTION
       pbcopy takes the standard input and places it in the  specified  paste-
       board.  If  no  pasteboard is specified, the general pasteboard will be
       used by default.  The input is placed in the pasteboard as  ASCII  data
       unless  it begins with the Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file header or
       the Rich Text Format (RTF) file header, in which case it is  placed  in
       the pasteboard as one of those data types.
       pbpaste removes the data from the pasteboard and writes it to the stan-
       dard output.  It normally looks first for ASCII data in the  pasteboard
       and  writes  that  to  the  standard output; if no ASCII data is in the
       pasteboard it looks for Encapsulated PostScript; if no EPS  if  present
       it  looks  for  Rich  Text.   If  none of those types is present in the
       pasteboard, pbpaste produces no output.

man pbcopy for more info