Waylon Walker

Use pbpaste for clean shell history

Waylon Walker avatar
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1 min read
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Using pbpaste for command substitution keeps sensitive or long URLs out of your shell history. Instead of typing git clone https://github.com/user/repo-with-long-name.git, copy the URL to clipboard and run git clone "$(pbpaste)". This prevents the URL from appearing in ~/.bash_history or ~/.zsh_history.

To get pbpaste working on both Xorg and Wayland, add this to your shell config:

if [[ $(command -v wl-copy) ]]; then
    alias pbcopy='wl-copy'
    pbpaste() { wl-paste; }
elif [[ $(command -v xclip) ]]; then
    alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
    pbpaste() { xclip -selection clipboard -o; }
fi

The function approach (instead of alias) enables command substitution, while the quotes around $(pbpaste) handle spaces and special characters safely.

Now you can use it.

git clone "$(pbpaste)"

More importantly secrets can stay out of your history.

export GITHUB_TOKEN="$(pbpaste)"
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="$(pbpaste)"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="$(pbpaste)"
export DATABASE_URL="$(pbpaste)"