Copy/Paste broken in MacOS Sierra

I found a solution that worked for me:

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I *Copied and *Pasted this from: (https://danwarne.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/fix-stuck-mac-os-clipboard-copypaste/)

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Something has been bugging me with OS X for a while — sometimes the OS X clipboard (officially known as “pasteboard”) gets stuck and won’t accept any new ‘copied’ content. Instead, when you ‘paste’ in any app, the clipboard always pastes back the last thing you successfully copied.

One solution to this is to reboot the Mac, but since Mac OS X is generally so stable and doesn’t need to be periodically rebooted as a matter of course, rebooting a machine with many open apps and windows can be a hassle.

Searching for this issue online provides a lot of bad advice (one website I saw said “repair permissions and if that doesn’t work, reinstall the OS”… terrible advice.)

Other websites incorrectly advise to kill the PBS process and restart it.

Apple’s manual page for PBS notes it is not related to the Pasteboard process. Instead, the correct process to kill is PBoard.

So, to fix a stuck clipboard (pasteboard) problem, you simply need to:

1. Open your application folder

2. Open the utilities subfolder

3. Open the Activity Monitor app

4. Type “pboard” into the search box at the top right

5. In the search results below, there should only be one result — a row listing the “pboard” process. Highlight it by clicking on it.

6. Click the “x” button at the top left of the window which represents ‘quit this process’

Once you’ve done that, OS X will kill the faulty PBoard process and re-establish it with a fresh one automatically. Your clipboard should be back to normal.

I have a suspicion that this stuck clipboard is a bug in OS X Mavericks 10.9 – I don’t recall it happening before I installed that. It is still an (infrequent) current problem as at 10.9.2."

Having the same problem.

I think it IS a major problem, people are just thinking they are doing it wrong or restarting their device. I would think most are not common visitors of these blogs and just accept what is happening, so it's not getting the attention is should.

Apple has become sloppy with their updates and introductions. I understand that their "community" has grown leaps and bounds and that makes it tougher to vet issues, but they based their OS on continuity and should be able to have better control than Microsoft did. They have the money to invest in a better vetting process. How do you release a phone and not have tested how the antennae is going to function?!?

Meanwhile, I'm extremely frustrated by this glitch or the idea of working in Safe Mode.

Copy/paste working randomly after updating to Sierra for me, too. You should pay attention before stating this "So rather than expect Apple to fix a problem that is not in the OS, you should try and figure out what is different in your system that makes this fail." -> the only thing that changed is the system was updated to Sierra. No issue in El Capitan/ issues in Sierra. Stop polluting the help discussions if you are not able to provide a solution.

I stand by what I wrote.

If a general bug in Sierra had made copy paste fail it would have been felt by millions of users and the outcry would have been deafening.

If it happens to half a dozen (or even a thousand) users but not to millions of others it is far more likely to be caused by something particular to the affected machines. You can wait for an update to fix it but are likely to be disappointed. Or you can ask for assistance and try to troubleshoot.

This is not how software updates work. If it worked in a previous version and it's not working in an updated one, then we are talking about a regression. You can find a lot of comments regarding the same issue if you bother to google it. So, again, rather than writing something empty of substance that provides no support, better not write at all.

invisioner wrote:

This is not how software updates work. If it worked in a previous version and it's not working in an updated one, then we are talking about a regression. You can find a lot of comments regarding the same issue if you bother to google it. So, again, rather than writing something empty of substance that provides no support, better not write at all.

If that were the case then software I was running in Jaguar would still run now.

New OS versions bring changes to frameworks, add new APIs and deprecate others.

Applications may need to be updated to work correctly in a new OS.

Applications or services that use deprecated or private APIs may simply stop working or cause problems in the new OS.

What applications? I'm copying from Mail and paste in TextEdit and it's not working 😮. Now, what API does that use??? Is is a regression or not? It definitely looks like a regression to me if something that used to work is not working anymore. I'm not talking semantics here, I think it's pretty straight forward.

I understand the issues you are facing are frustrating. For sure, any user would expect copy and paste between Apple applications to just work.

All macs run a different combination of software - applications, drivers, daemons, etc.

Quite often something obscure that you may not even be aware you have, and that may have worked fine for several iterations of the OS, may break with an update, and cause issues that appear to be completely unrelated.

If you want further assistance, please run Etrecheck and post its report here. It may illuminate the cause, which, again, may seem completely unrelated.

Etrecheck is a utility developed by Etresoft, a respected member of this community, to help users. Its report will give an overview of your software installation, from which quite often one can point at likely causes of issues. It is used every day in this forum, as you can easily verify.

I didn't want any assistance, I just pointed out a comment that does not bring anything to the table but instead throws the blame on the user, which is kind of annoying. If I weren't myself a developer I would take your advice as useful, instead you just made me waste time answering a complete useless thread. And btw, recommending a shady app from an even shadier website is not helping. I can read my own logs and debug, thanks.

I am here trying to help people. But then you don't need assistance after all. You are just trolling.

Etrecheck is an incredibly useful program, daily recommended in this forum and has helped save the bacon for many afflicted users. Nothing shady about it.

I am out. I will no longer follow this thread.

Helping people? Does this sound like help? -> "So rather than expect Apple to fix a problem that is not in the OS, you should try and figure out what is different in your system that makes this fail." It looks like you're the troll here, blaming users for the a valid failure that happens to a lot of people and posting ambiguous/irrelevant answers to concrete issues. Stay out of discussion if your solution sounds like "Restart in safe mode". How do you know with such certainty it's not the OS? Are you an Apple dev working on MacOS? Why do you mislead people by providing directions without understanding the issue ("figure out what is different in your system that makes this fail" -> nothing is different, only the updated OS is different here)? That's all, I'm just tired of boards full of people hunting [prestige] with non-answers.

Several people have noted "Oh, turns out I was using an old version of "X", I updated it and copy/paste is working fine now" so honestly his advice is good?

I've never encountered this problem; if it was actually a problem with Sierra itself, wouldn't everyone be encountering it? Since that's not the case, and rather it's individuals having problems, it seems pretty obvious that it's something about their specific set-up that is having conflicts with Sierra.

That said, it is true that a company as big as Apple should have beta-tested Sierra better and figured out some way to make it work with older apps, OR they should've pushed some sort of notification saying "Sierra may cause conflicts with XYZ".

It is not older apps that don't support copy/paste, even bundled MacOS apps like Mail and TextEdit are responding randomly to copy/paste between them. All software is at its latest version, even XCode and Developer Tools). It didn't work before, it didn't work after updating installed packages (PyCharm for instance). But it did work in El Capitan. The bug was introduced in Sierra and I'm not the only one reporting it. It breaks randomly and especially when copying/pasting between apps, probably this is why not many people noticed it or blame it on their missed Command+C execution. It works inside the same app, but it breaks between different apps.

Anyway, Restart in safe mode as the only solution someone can give is not actually a solution. And if that user, despite being unable to provide a technical response but only a high level one, blames the reporter for the bug when there are tons of Google results about it it's just outrageous. Time wasters are the worst.

I have many times reported bugs to Apple, been told that what I'm describing is not a known issue and must be something specific to my setup, corrupted on my machine/device, etc, only to have the advisor with whom I'm speaking finally follow the steps I've outlined, and discover that they can reliably reproduce the bug on their own machines/devices. The notion that millions of users would be reporting something if it were actually a widespread bug is just wrong. Most users do not use their computers, tablets, or phones deeply enough to knowingly experience intermittent or subtle bugs, and neither do they have the knowledge, experience, or willingness required to properly communicate the issues they are facing.

"I've never encountered this problem; if it was actually a problem with Sierra itself, wouldn't everyone be encountering it?"

Not necessarily. The issue might be specific to those with certain hardware, specific settings, or a multitude of other variables. I'm not going to argue that Apple should always catch every bug before releasing an OS update, but I do think that they should work harder and faster on solving the problems that are noticed by their users, and I find it highly frustrating that they don't answer questions and deal with issues which are reported and discussed in their own forums here.

Safe Mode can indeed be a great diagnostic tool, but results of using it can also be quite misleading. Let's say I'm suffering from a bug which is consistently cured temporarily by logging out of my account or rebooting. If I start in safe mode, and I don't immediately encounter the issue, how long do you think I'm going to keep using my computer in safe mode before I think that the problem doesn't exist there? What if it takes three days of use for a problem to present itself? How many forum threads have I read here where some "helpful" person suggests rebooting, several readers try that, report back that their issue was solved, credit the helpful person with solving their issues, then report back a day later that the problem has recurred? At some point, these helpful people who suggest the same things in thread after thread after thread need to stop presenting their advice as likely solutions, and attach to them the requisite disclaimers: "This may only help temporarily, so wait for hours/days before concluding that your issue is resolved" etc.

While restarting solves the problem, why does this happen more than often? For me this happens at a frequency of once a week. I restart a couple of times in the week but still... I feel like the quality of the Mac OS is going down 😟