‘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