Copy content of txt file without opening it

Question

Is there a way or program to copy content of .txt file to clipboard without opening it?

Now I have to open->ctrl+a->ctrl+c->close. A little bit annoying if you do it often.

Is there a possible shortcut for this operation?

Answer 1

There's a clipboard utility in Windows called clip.exe.

In the command prompt, you can copy the contents of a file to your clipboard using

clip < file.txt

This will be useful if you use the command prompt often. If you don't, you can add it to your context menu. I've just tested this out with instructions from HowToGeek on Windows 7, but I had to make a little tweak before I got it to work.

HowToGeek has also mentioned that clip.exe does not come with XP, so you'll have to download it from Microsoft FTP here and place it in your Windows system directory.

Steps:

1. Open regedit.exe
2. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/txtfile/shell (This didn't work for me so I had to put it under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/*/shell, which makes it show up in EVERY context menu)
3. Add a new key titled copytoclip
4. Set the default value of copytoclip to something like Copy to Clipboard
5. Under copytoclip, add a key called command
6. Set the default value of command to cmd /c clip < "%1"

Now whenever you right click on a file, you should see a Copy to Clipboardoption. What it does it that when you click on it, it will open a command prompt and run the clip.exe utility on the output piped from the file you selected.

Answer 2

For XP I generally us the Send To X powertoy available from Microsoft.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc751394.aspx

And while I'll probably go with Jin's answer which I also upvoted on Win7. One of the things I love about SendToX is the send to clipboard as name. I have probably averaged 4 uses per day of this since it came out with Win95.