How can I install xclip on an EC2 instance?

Question

I'm following Github's instructions for adding an SSH key. I've generated the id_rsa.pub file from my AWS EC2 instance, but I cannot complete the step that has me copy the contents of the file using xclip because I cannot install xclip onto the EC2 instance.

1. I tried to install xclip on the EC2 instance using sudo yum install xclip, but that didn't work ("No package xclip available").
2. So I looked around and found more detailed install instructions, but they didn't work either ("curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found"), and the suggested correct URLs in the comments also failed.
3. (I also tried just copying the text contents of the id_rsa.pub file using Putty and ctl-c, but Github declared the resulting key invalid.)

So, how do I install xclip on 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2012.09?

Serle

Answer 1

I needed this today for a file larger than a ssh-key, and cat was not enough. You need to enable the EPEL repo in EC2 in order to get xclip:

wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
sudo yum-config-manager --enable epel
sudo yum install xclip -y

Runoff

tried the accepted solution and not working in amazon linux 2 – Baugh

Answer 2

You don't need xclip. Just ssh into the EC2 instance and cat the key to your terminal, then copy and paste it from your terminal to wherever you need it.

Otes

Using cat worked. Now just need github to document their SSH steps. – Serle

Not an answer to the question – Whimsicality

you can't use cat all the time the cases actually. what if you want to copy a large file? – Savory

@Savory obviously, but the initial question was about a ssh key, which is small. If you need to transfer larger files, scp is the way, or if that's not possible, maybe zmodem. – Otes

I agree, not an answer to the question. I need to copy a different, large buffer to the clipboard – Antares

Using xclip is convenient even over ssh. Here's an example - github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/… . And it works perfectly if you ssh -X. – Nimrod

Answer 3

Use

sudo amazon-linux-extras install epel -y
sudo yum install xclip -y

Source: https://gist.github.com/kevin-kientopp/7a1dee73ab0f1bdb21fe158407a028ea

Raby

Answer 4

I don't mean to wake up the zombies but in case someone is still wondering you can wget the rpm (i.e. from here) and then

sudo yum localinstall xclip-0.12-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

Note: you may need to do the same for some dependencies.

Whimsicality