Another Neat Command
I was signing up for github and they wanted my SSH public key. In their instructions for how to get and generate the key they have you run a command like this:
- cat id_rsa.pub | pbcopy
pbcopy is a neat Mac utility that takes it’s input and copies it to the clipboard.
So handy.
Son, You are truly a geek!! And I am so proud of you for it!! A well rounded geek at that!!
Sorry, I couldn’t resist! Since I have absolutely no idea what you are referring to, I feel humbled!!
Too bad some of your technical acumen didn’t rub off on me!!
Later!!
Do you think I understand half the medical jargon you talk about? I might know what a certain term means in a very basic sense, or at least be able to guess by lexical components. Your knowledge domain seems as much magic to me as mine does to you.
You need to know very little about a UNIX shell/command prompt to understand the command I posted.
1. id_rsa.pub is a text file.
(Unix doesn’t care about differences in file types, generally.)
2. cat prints a file to the screen.
3. The ‘|’ character is an operator that makes a ‘pipe’ between the output of one command and the input to another command. In this case the output of ‘cat’ (i.e., the contents of id_rsa.pub) is being ‘piped’ into ‘pbcopy’.
4. pbcopy simply copies it’s input to the system-wide clipboard
What do a cardiologist, a urologist and a programmer have in common? They’re all glorified plumbers.