Seems a utility called "xclip" and "xsel" are required, but is there anything simpler, that doesn't require extra utilities, along the lines of
This would for GNOME.

Take a look at gpm which allows you to copy and paste with your mouse whilst you are in a true terminal shell ( the "boring", non-GUI type ).

I'm okay with using the mouse to copy-paste from a terminal, but because the terminal might interpret characters differently I wanted to by-pass it completely, sort of like redirecting output to the clipboard. I guess there's no easy way to do this, otherwise google would have found something by now...

Because you have not really explained your situation (what you'd like to be able to do, with what processes / commands ), I think I do not really understand your question.

If you are in a terminal, you can redirect "output" from one process to the "input" of another with the pipe "|" symbol. Eg
mount | grep sda

For all the gory details of redirection and piping, please see man bash

I'm familiar with redirection, the example I give in my first post is pretty straight-forward: I'm wondering if there is some series of shell commands that will allow me to easily redirect output to the clipboard.
i.e. say I have some text "bar" in file "foo.txt". Currently inorder to get these contents into the copy buffer I need to do something like "cat foo.txt" then copy-paste the console output. This is both tedious and prone to error as I discovered with certain non-ASCII data. So what I'd like to be able to do instead is directly insert something into the copy-buffer. The only solution I've found to do this is xclip, so I'm wondering if there are any, more native, alternatives.

Which "clipboard" ?

AFAIK "the shell" has no concept of "clipboard". There may be "copy buffers" in applications like vi and emacs, but I don't think this is what you are looking for. Otherwise, gpm is pretty good.

"Clipboards" are a GUI concept. How they handle them depends on the GUI you are running, but you are asking for shell commands.

Yep, that makes sense, but like you can control the GUI via the shell (i.e. startx, system-config-display, etc.), was wondering if there was such a command to control GNOME's 'clipboard'.

Can you give an example of what you can't do; without posting "cat foo.txt > clipboard". What do you intend to do with what winds up in the clipboard?

The most classic example that I can come up with is how to copy text from a browser screen to a gnome terminal. In the browser, merely highlight and CTL-C, and in the terminal use "ALT-P". But, as others mentioned, this is a function of the gnome-terminal.

To be honest, the idea came from these forums when I wanted to post the output of various logs in pastebin. Gedit garbled some of them and high-lighting from the console seemed primitive, I just thought there would be a better way, like "cat foo.log > clipboard", go to pastebin, ctrl+v.

Well ... to make a long story short: no, there's no way to
avoid those extra utilities. There's no "device node" for
the x-clipboard, or a pipe ... feel free to use the source
of xclip to make one ;}



Cheers,
Tink