Windows 11 comes loaded with a ton of tools and apps right out of the box. You might call some of it bloat, while others are genuinely useful pieces of software that can help you do basic tasks or keep your PC safe. And others are simply tools you might not even know existed.

And that’s the case with this tiny, yet valuable tool called Clip. It lives in the command line, and it has one singular feature, but it’s a pretty interesting one, so let’s talk about it.

What Clip does

It’s very basic, really

The purpose of Clip is an extremely simple one at heart, but it’s easy to see how it can be useful. Simply put, Clip is a command you can append at the end of any command you run to copy the output of that command to the clipboard.

Say, for example, you run a ping test and you want to share it with someone who’s helping you with your internet. Normally, you might type in ping 1.1.1.1 to test your connection to that IP address, the select and copy that result, or take a screenshot of the Command Prompt window. However, if you type in:

ping 1.1.1.1 | clip

Instead of seeing the result directly, the entire output of the command will be placed in the clipboard, so you can paste it into Notepad or a messaging service to share with someone else.

And sure, for a smaller command like that, it may not make a huge difference to copy the contents automatically, but what if it’s a command that produces a much longer output? If you’re running a Batch script, for example, that can include multiple commands with many lines of output. And as great as the simplicity of Command Prompt can be, scrolling through various lines of output to find everything a command did or everything that may have gone wrong is tedious. Text is relatively large and scrolling the page can be a bit finicky so it’s hard to track exactly where you are.

By automatically copying the output to the clipboard, you can then paste it on a more readable text editor, whether that’s Notepad or even Microsoft Word, and more easily read through the entire output to find anything that may not have worked as intended. Plus, scrolling through the output and selecting it requires a mouse, whereas this allows you to use a keyboard pretty much the entire time, which, for some users, can save a lot of time, too. It’s a subtle improvement, but it can save a lot of time when used correctly.

Another great use for this is to combine it with the dir command, so you can copy the entire list of files and folders in your current directory to the clipboard.

A small downside

There’s a bit of a caveat with using the Clip command, but how much it matters is really up to each use case. When the output of a command is copied to the clipboard, it’s actually not shown in the Command Prompt window itself. That means your window will just appear to be stuck while running the command until it’s time to enter another command.

For a lot of commands that run quickly, that’s probably fine, but if you’re running a command that takes some time to finalize, not having any output may make you worry that the process is stuck. For someone as impatient as me, that can be a problem, but it depends on who you are.

It can copy text from files, too

Perhaps not as useful

Another capability Clip provides is the ability to copy the contents of a file to the clipboard. That’s not as big of a deal considering you could just as easily open the file and copy said content, but it does allow you to stay in the Command Prompt window if that’s something you prefer, meaning you don’t have to open the file in Notepad.

To do this, you can type in the following command, replacing **** with the full path to the file:

clip

Of course, there aren’t a ton of file types this will work with, but files with a .txt or .bat extension will be supported. It is worth noting, however, if you’re using Windows Terminal, it defaults to the Windows PowerShell profile, and this specific command is not supported. This is because the ** symbol is an operator that’s not usable in the same way it is in Command Prompt, so you’ll need to use the right profile.**

I also noticed that if your document includes an em dash, the clip command is not able to parse it properly, so it will look like some weird characters when you paste it.

A tiny hidden gem

Until recently, I had no idea this Clip feature existed, but it’s been around for quite a while. I probably wouldn’t have known about it even if I tried to look for it from the name alone, since looking for “Windows clip” on Google will either direct you to things about the Snipping Tool or Clipchamp these days.

Regardless, it’s still a fairly useful feature, and this might be your first time hearing about it, too. If that’s the case, I hope you find a use for it, too.