Reading and Writing Mac OS X Clipboard Using Ruby

Here is a neat trick on how to access OS X pasteboard services with Ruby or any other shell script. It is based on pbcopy and pbpaste:

Reverse string in clipboard:

s = IO.popen('pbpaste', 'r+').read
IO.popen('pbcopy', 'w').puts s.reverse

Generate html syntax highlighting using Syntax:

require 'rubygems'
require 'syntax/convertors/html'

convertor = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax “ruby”

html = convertor.convert(IO.popen('pbpaste', 'r+').read)

IO.popen('pbcopy', 'r+').puts html

Gotta love Mac OS X!