The Cut, Copy & Paste Daemon in OS X

Ever seen com.apple.pboard in a launchctl list?  Wondered what it did?  This is the infamous clipboard (aka – pasteboard, or on the iPhone the NSPasteboard server).  If you unload the pboard entry in launchctl then you will no longer be able to cut, copy and paste.  pboard relies on the existence of and the accessibility to the user that initiated pboard (ie – root) to have access to the /tmp folder.  Therefore, pboard will be wonky without /tmp and without pboard you won’t be able to paste things.  So, when troubleshooting cut, copy and paste issues, first verify that /tmp exists and then verify that pboard is running using the following command:

launchctl list | grep com.apple.pboard

And if it isn’t running, start it with:

launctl start com.apple.pboard

Similar Articles:

1 Comment

Shell to Clipboard & Back Again | Krypted says: 15 January 2010 - 7:02 am

[...] kind enough to supply us with a pair of really useful tools for interfacing with the clipboard (er, pasteboard) in Mac OS X: pbcopy and pbpaste. To use pbcopy, which copies text into the pasteboard, simply pipe [...]

Leave a comment