I saw that bit about multiple clipboards, but it’s so baffling that I didn’t want to figure it out.

Why in the &*(% is it done this way? Eek.

I tried:
echo Hello | xclip -i -selection clipboard

From all my applications, I could hit CTRL+V or middle-click to paste, but the “Paste” menu showed up in grey for all those applications. Strange.

Doing some digging turns up that X has multiple clipboards called Primary, Secondary, and Clipboard.

More info in it here: http://standards.freedesktop.org/clipboards-spec/clipboards-latest.txt

This is a good start though, thanks.

Do this:

uptime | xclip

In your favorite X application (like gedit) middle-click. It should toss your uptime into gedit.

Unfortunately (at least with Ubuntu) there appears to be different clipboards. The X clipboard pastes when you middle-click, but there is another clipboard for when you actually click copy/cut/paste from a menu or use the Control+C/V/X

Apparently, this is a rather challenging thing to do. I’m there with you though – I will love to pipe into the clipboard. I’ve looked for a way to do it, but have never found such a way. Someday…

cat myfile | x-clipboard

That would occasionally save me a lot of selecting and copying.