Display contents of file and also copy it to the clipboard

Question

I would like to create a helper function that displays my public key in the terminal and also copies it to the clipboard. How would I do that?

I tried cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy, but this only copies the key to the clipboard.

Answer 1

Just paste the clipboard into the terminal window-

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy; pbpaste

or use tee in the pipe with process substitution

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | tee >(pbcopy)

or forget about using pipes altogether

pbcopy <~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub; pbpaste