{"id":9031,"date":"2006-12-25T15:09:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-25T15:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/powershell\/2006\/12\/25\/send-signaturetoclipboard\/"},"modified":"2019-02-18T13:21:01","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T20:21:01","slug":"send-signaturetoclipboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/send-signaturetoclipboard\/","title":{"rendered":"Send-SignatureToClipBoard"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my previous blog about the Philosophy of Automation<\/a>, I encouraged everyone to share their automation even when it was small.  Here I’ll follow that advice.<\/p>\n

I find myself doing quite a bit of blogging and commenting on other people’s blogs.  I am often struck by the sorry state of blogging software.  I could go on for quite some time on that topic but the one thing I want to highlight is the issue of Signatures.  I have a signature that I use for all my entries.  I used to type it in each time but then I would get variations because I didn’t remember it quite right and it was a pain to type (BTW – Automation is not JUST about productivity – it is about QUALITY as well.  I should blog that at some point.)  Anyway, it didn’t take me long to put this into a file SIG.TXT that I would then “cat” in a PowerShell window and then cut-n-paste into the application. The problem is that I’m not a very good cut-n-paster and sometimes I vary the size of my PowerShell Window which caused wrapping so I would have to change the size of my window and cat the file again (and then change it back).  <\/p>\n

It’s sad to admit how long I put up with this stupid workflow before I decided to automate it but now in my profile file I have the following:<\/p>\n

function Send-SignatureToClipBoard
{
   cat c:\\ps\\Sig.txt |clip
}
Set-Alias snstc Send-SignatureToClipBoard<\/p>\n

This sends my signature into the clipboard (I bet a $1 you could have guessed that \ud83d\ude42 ) so that can paste it with ease.  Notice that I gave it a good descriptive name to help me remember it (“Send” is a common verb) and to make it self-documenating and then a pithy alias (“SN” is the recommended shortcut for “SEND” so it is it is very easy to remember, I think the sentence as I type “SeNd Signature To Clipboard” => SNSTC).<\/p>\n

So this is a good example of a simple bit of automation that isn’t going to change the world but it does move the ball forward a bit.  I hope you find it useful.  If you found this useful, I’ve made my point and you should do the same.<\/p>\n

Cheers!  (Time to switch to my PowerShell window to type SNSTC!) <\/p>\n

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows PowerShell\/MMC Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/PowerShell<\/a>
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:  http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/technet\/scriptcenter\/hubs\/msh.mspx<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Postscript:<\/strong>  It turns out that CLIP.EXE is only shipped with Vista (so upgrade today \ud83d\ude42 ).  It turns out that that is a great thing because it should encourage you to download, use, participate-in the PowerShell Community Extensions Project<\/a>.   It has an out-ClipBoard project which should work a treat for you! <\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my previous blog about the Philosophy of Automation, I encouraged everyone to share their automation even when it was small.  Here I’ll follow that advice. I find myself doing quite a bit of blogging and commenting on other people’s blogs.  I am often struck by the sorry state of blogging software.  I could go on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":600,"featured_media":13641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

In my previous blog about the Philosophy of Automation, I encouraged everyone to share their automation even when it was small.  Here I’ll follow that advice. I find myself doing quite a bit of blogging and commenting on other people’s blogs.  I am often struck by the sorry state of blogging software.  I could go on […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/600"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}