GPASTE-CLIENT(1)

💖 NAME 💖

Okay so gpaste-client is the CLI bestie for GPaste — a lightweight clipboard manager for the Gnome desktop. This page lives in the General Commands Manual, and it is honestly giving “clipboard management but make it iconic” energy 💅✨

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

gpaste-client [options...] [command [arguments...]]
command | gpaste-client [add | add-password <name> | replace <uuid>]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

Bestie, GPaste is a modular clipboard management system with a fully DBus-based daemon, a CLI client and a gtk+ tray icon. The whole vibe is “clipboard but organized.” 🫶

With no command, gpaste-client adds what is piped into it, or displays the history when nothing is. add, add-password and replace take their last argument from what is piped when it is not given. No other command reads what is piped. With no command, --help and --version do not read it either, and neither do the options that change how the history is displayed — those then display it without adding what is piped: --favourites, --oneline, --raw, --reverse, --use-index or --zero.

A command that talks to the daemon refuses any argument, option value or piped text that is not valid UTF-8, file paths included. It starts the daemon when none is running, and waits for it to serve a history — while it settles its storage, questions to the user included, for up to two minutes — before it calls it, failing at once on a GPaste 45 or 50 an update left running. Only daemon-reexec and migrate, which have to reach such a daemon, call it without waiting.

Printed on a terminal, an item’s control characters show as U+FFFD rather than reach the terminal, which an escape sequence would have act on it; line breaks and tabs stay. Written to a file or a pipe, items are as they are. No cap, fr fr. 💀✨

🎀 COMMANDS 🎀

• gpaste-client [history] — Display the history with indexes. 💖
• gpaste-client history-size — Display the size of the current history.
• gpaste-client search <pattern> — Display the items of the history matching <pattern>, a Perl-compatible regular expression matched whatever the case; a password is matched by its name. Quote what the shell or the expression would read otherwise, as in gpaste-client search 'c++'.
• gpaste-client get-history — Get the name of the current history.
• gpaste-client backup-history [<history>] <backup> — Back up <history>, the current one when not given, as <backup>.
• gpaste-client switch-history <name> — Switch to the history <name>, starting a new one when there is none.
• gpaste-client delete-history [<name>] — Delete the history <name>, the current one when not given.
• gpaste-client list-histories — List available histories.
• gpaste-client add [<text>] — Add the text into the history. Without <text>, the text is everything read from stdin.
• gpaste-client add-password <name> [<password>] — Add the name / password pair to the history. Without <password>, the password is everything read from stdin bar the one newline ending its line: given as an argument, it would be kept in the shell’s history file and shown to every user of the system while the command runs. A store printing more than the password, as pass show does with an entry’s other lines, is cut to its first line first: pass show bank | head -n 1 | gpaste-client add-password bank. 🔐
• gpaste-client delete-password <name> — Delete the password <name>.
• gpaste-client make-password <uuid> <name> — Make the item matching <uuid> from the history a password named <name>. Handed the uuid of an item that is already a password, it renames that one instead of creating a second one, and leaves its timeout alone unless --timeout says otherwise.
• gpaste-client get <uuid> — Get the item matching <uuid> from the history.
• gpaste-client select <uuid> — Put the item matching <uuid> from the history into the clipboard.
• gpaste-client replace <uuid> [<contents>] — Replace the contents of the item matching <uuid> from the history with the provided one. Without <contents>, they are everything read from stdin.
• gpaste-client strip-rich-text <uuid> — Drop the rich text flavours of the item matching <uuid>, keeping the plain text it shows. A text item is the only kind this takes: a uris item’s special mimes are how a file list is handed over, not another spelling of its text. Editing a text item, or turning one into a password, drops its rich text too.
• gpaste-client merge [--decoration|-d <string>] [--separator|-s <string>] <uuid> … <uuid> — Merge the items matching the uuids from the history and put the result in the clipboard.

If foo, bar and baz are respectively uuids 5cb227f9-857d-490b-8ea1-f5f33f59f04e, b4a7aa02-ef9a-4c29-b951-ebbdb4ed279b and 99da883b-0544-4cb4-92dd-733420a9db6d in history and you run:

gpaste-client merge -d '"' -s ','
5cb227f9-857d-490b-8ea1-f5f33f59f04e
b4a7aa02-ef9a-4c29-b951-ebbdb4ed279b
99da883b-0544-4cb4-92dd-733420a9db6d

You will end up with "foo","bar","baz" in your clipboard. Slay. 🌈

• gpaste-client delete <uuid> — Delete the item matching <uuid> from the history.
• gpaste-client favourite <uuid> — Pin the item matching <uuid>. A pinned item is never dropped automatically: neither the history size limit nor the memory one may evict it, so the history grows past its cap rather than let one go. Emptying or deleting the history, or deleting the item by uuid, still drops it. 👑
• gpaste-client unfavourite <uuid> — Unpin the item matching <uuid>, putting it back under both caps. It may be evicted straight away, if that is what was keeping the history over one of them.
• gpaste-client file <path> — Put the content of the file at <path> into the clipboard.
• command | gpaste-client — Put the output of the command into the history.
• gpaste-client empty [<name>] — Empty the history <name>, the current one when not given.
• gpaste-client start — Start tracking clipboard changes.
• gpaste-client stop — Stop tracking clipboard changes.
• gpaste-client upload <uuid> — Upload the item matching <uuid> to a pastebin service, and print the url it landed at; only a text item can be uploaded, any other is refused.
• gpaste-client upload-and-copy <uuid> — Upload the item matching <uuid> to a pastebin service, and print the url it landed at, as upload does, a text item alone; the daemon then puts the url where it can be pasted, as the keyboard shortcut does: in the history, or on the clipboard alone should the history refuse it.
• gpaste-client ui — Launch the graphical tool.
• gpaste-client daemon-reexec — Re-execute the daemon, for example after upgrading GPaste.
• gpaste-client migrate — Migrate the history to a different storage backend.
• gpaste-client change-passphrase — Change the passphrase of the encrypted history, re-encrypting it with the new one.
• gpaste-client doctor — Check the history folder and every history, and put right what can be: restrict the folder and every folder in it to their owner, and encrypt the histories left under another passphrase with the one the history in use takes, which the daemon asks for theirs to do. Prints what it found and did, and exits with a failure status when anything is left wrong. 🩺✨
• gpaste-client preferences — Launch the configuration tool.
• gpaste-client version — Display the version.
• gpaste-client daemon-version — Display the daemon version.
• gpaste-client help — Display the help.
• gpaste-client about — Display the about dialog.
• gpaste-client show-history — Make the GNOME Shell extension display the history.

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🦋 OPTIONS 🦋

• -h, --help — Display the help, as help does.
• -v, --version — Display the version, as version does.
• -f, --favourites — Only display the pinned items, when listing the history or a search.
• -i, --use-index — Address items by their index rather than their uuid: their position in the history, starting at zero, as gpaste-client history --use-index displays it, and a search under it beside each match. Every argument naming an item is read as an index then, each of merge’s included, while text, names, search patterns, paths and history names keep their usual meaning. An index is an unsigned decimal number and nothing else: one with a sign or a space in front, or anything after its digits, is refused. 🔢
• -t, --timeout <seconds> — How long a password stays on the clipboard once it is the active item, for add-password and make-password. When it runs out, the next item that is not a password is selected, or the clipboard is emptied if the history holds none. 0 lets a password stay for as long as anything else would, and 65535 is as high as it goes. Without this option, a password already in the history keeps the timeout it carries and the countdown running for it, while one being created takes the password-timeout setting. ⏳
• -o, --oneline — Display each item on one line, without new lines.
• -r, --raw — Display the item raw (without index).
• -e, --reverse — Display the items in reverse order.
• -z, --zero — Use NUL character instead of new lines between each item, or each history list-histories lists, a history’s name being free to hold a line break.
• -d, --decoration <string> — Add <string> to the beginning and the end of each item merge joins.
• -s, --separator <string> — Add <string> between each item merge joins.

xoxo, GPASTE-CLIENT(1) 💖✨ — from the General Commands Manual, and there’s no separate source/version or date line on this page, so this is the whole sign-off, bestie 🫶