In a previous article, I covered creating, starting, and stopping iOS simulations. macOS comes with a handy tool to interact with the clipboard (aka pasteboard) on a Mac called pbcopy. You can redirect information from a file into your clipboard using the pbcopy command. Here, we’ll simply call pbcopy and then a file path
pbcopy ~/Desktop/transfer.txt
You can then redirect your text into simctl by doing a pbpaste into
xcrun simctl pbpaste booted
Once you’ve copied your data, clean up the transfer file:
rm ~/Desktop/transfer.txt
You can also pull text out. If you write data into the clipboard (e.g. during instrumentation) then you can extract it from that pasteboard using the simctl subcommand pbcopy as follows:
xcrun simctl pbcopy booted
The xcrun simctl subcommand also comes with a number of other pretty cool automations for programatic control, which I’ll try and cover later.