Pastebin

Share your clipboard across machines over SSH. There is no server daemon: the "server" is any host you can ssh into, and the shared clipboard is a single file on it.

Usage

# machine 1
echo 'hello' | cross-copy

# machine 2
cross-paste | cat

Both commands also sync the system clipboard (Wayland, X11, macOS, Windows). If the server is unreachable, they fall back to the local clipboard.

Setup

1. Put cross-copy and cross-paste on your PATH (e.g. ~/.local/bin).
2. Make sure key-based ssh to your server works: ssh myserver true.
3. Create ~/.config/pastebin/config:

PASTEBIN_HOST=myserver

Configuration

Read from ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/pastebin/config (a plain shell fragment); environment variables take precedence.

Variable	Default	Meaning
PASTEBIN_HOST	unset	ssh destination (~/.ssh/config aliases work). Unset or empty = local clipboard only.
PASTEBIN_REMOTE_FILE	.local/state/pastebin/clip	Storage path on the server, relative to the remote home.
PASTEBIN_SSH_TIMEOUT	5	ssh ConnectTimeout in seconds.

Using an ~/.ssh/config alias

PASTEBIN_HOST is passed straight to ssh, so any alias works, including hosts behind a ProxyCommand (e.g. an AWS SSM tunnel):

Host ssm-tunnel
    HostName i-0123456789abcdef0
    User myuser
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
    ProxyCommand sh -c "aws ssm start-session --target %h --document-name AWS-StartSSHSession --parameters 'portNumber=%p'"

PASTEBIN_HOST=ssm-tunnel
PASTEBIN_SSH_TIMEOUT=15

Tunneled connections can take longer than the default 5-second timeout to establish; raise PASTEBIN_SSH_TIMEOUT if you see WARN: Could not push/fetch on first use while a retry succeeds. Auth must be key-based (IdentityFile): the scripts run ssh with BatchMode=yes and will never prompt for a password.

Test

./test.sh

Round-trips a message through the server. Uses localhost by default; point it elsewhere with PASTEBIN_TEST_HOST=myserver ./test.sh.