The main focus of this blog is to write about SQL Server related stuff – but now and then in the past we have written a few blog posts which was not 100% SQL Server related – and that is exactly what I am going to do today.

A few months back I discovered this little trick or feature, call it what you want – and I think that it is about time to share it with our readers. I was running SSIS packages from the command prompt, nothing wild in that, so many of us do that on a daily basis. One thing that I always find annoying is when you have to copy text from the prompt output, that you will use in another application. This was my normal workaround for that:

When doing bug hunting it is not unusual that I end up with tons of files just containing the output from my command line, and even worse I am not good at deleting all these files.

Then a few week someone told about this little trick (|Clip) – and what this little command does, is that it copies the output from my command line to my clip board – this saves the hassle of creating files, and even better (for me anyway) you don’t have to remember to delete the old output files afterwards. So from now on this is my favorite method for getting the output from a command line:

And then it’s just a matter of starting you favorite txt editor and paste the content of the clip board into it. This makes it so much easier to copy txt from the command line output, the hassle with lines that go onto multiple lines is not a big problem anymore.

Another I-Catching solution – enjoy