Copy/Paste broken in MacOS Sierra

Perhaps you are correct, we can agree to differ. I agree that Mr Sequeria is free to post as he likes. I urged him to post fewer comments on this issue, having assessed his knowledge of the actual technical issue (scant at best).

As for me having "just signed up", I am one of the oldest mac forum users you will ever meet. I've bought my first Apple in 1991, and have been programming them for decades.

The thing is, I don't post much. Probably about one post every five years or so. I'm on fire just now. Two in one day!

IMO, these forums are Apple's way of not spending money but appearing to fix shoddy software. Sometimes users will offer you useful information and a fix, but most often it is for folks who talk too much and who have a weird, burning need to been seen as helpful and smart by their peers.

Notice how paid Apple staff don't waste their precise time fixing folks problems with their products?

Yeah, I noticed that too.

cynik wrote:

I urged him to post fewer comments on this issue, having assessed his knowledge of the actual technical issue (scant at best). seen as helpful and smart by their peers.

How many people have you helped in these forums? How about demonstrating all this knowledge you profess to have?

As for me having "just signed up", I am one of the oldest mac forum users you will ever meet. I've bought my first Apple in 1991, and have been programming them for decades.

I've certainly had Macs for longer than that.

IMO, these forums are Apple's way of not spending money but appearing to fix shoddy software. Sometimes users will offer you useful information and a fix, but most often it is for folks who talk too much and who have a weird, burning need to been seen as helpful and smart by their peers.

Notice how paid Apple staff don't waste their precise time fixing folks problems with their products?

Apple staff have been absolutely great when I've taken a problem to them. By making an appointment at my local Apple Store. This forum is not a replacement for Apple Customer Service. It's an added bonus that Apple runs solely for the benefit of its customers. They're very clear about that in the Terms of Use.

I think it's just a little sad when people contribute nothing but criticism while boasting about their superior knowledge.

Please can someone help?

I can copy but i cant paste it then.

I tried all. Restarting, also with Safe Mod - in safe mod paste doesnt work as well.

Am really confused because I have tried all options which you all gave here.

When I open the finder and search the files in the folder and copy the search result to paste into another folder. The "apparently" copy is done, but when I paste it it does not glue, even giving a "beep" when I call command + V.

One thing I noticed is the following, the folder data is videos, then the app icon that opens the videos appears, when I search the results all the videos are without the video app icon with that default file icon, it seems that in search results the finder does not identify the file type. When I click on command + I in the search result this text appears in Sharing / Permissions file: "you have unknown access".

This started to happen after I upgraded to the High Sierra, in the Sierra work.

I have this issue as well. I updated to High Sierra the other day, and found that I can no longer paste web address from Fetch, into any other app. Copy seems to work, but not pasting… When I try to paste [cmd P] I get the error sound. Depending on the length of the addresses I’m working with, this issue can turn what should be a simple 2-second copy/paste into a minutes long process. This is killing my productivity. Please please help.

Restarting in safe-mode is like fixing a broken fender with duct tape. Having to do this every time you want to cut and paste between apps makes a computer all but useless. Apple should be offering a permanent fix for this problem!

My comment is not directed to @pastelsky but to Apple itself.

Are we really being asked to convert to safe mode or reboot every time we need to copy and paste?

This is obviously a long time but seeing the number of people with the same issue. Is it possible to have more resources focused on this issue?

Thank you

Genius! Thank you...this has been bothering me for ages. Probably years, but because it is a sporadic problem I just put up with it. Kept getting the blank white square this morning and decided to look for a fix and luckily got your soluiton as opposed to the nuclear 'reinstall' and 'it's not mac's fault' suggestions.

This reply is to Alex's suggestion to kill the 'pboard' process in Activity monitor.

The exact same thing just happened to me. I upgraded directly from Yosemite 10.10.5 to High Sierra and upped it to 10.13.3, and my copy/paste is broken. Nothing else is different. I performed the upgrade this morning. I tried the solution offered about about killing pboard, and it didn't work. So I rebooted; it's still broken; and here I am. What now?

OK, I don't have my problem fixed yet, but I have an avenue to explore. I'm on a new platform that used to belong to another user. I simply moved my install disk and a couple other disks over to that machine and then upgraded from Yosemite. I seem to have a disk permissions issue that's not letting me copy to another drive.

Maybe this idea will help someone else.

How can this be? I cannot copy and paste??? Tried the reboot, the safe mode... A software I use started crashing after the update which is bad enough, but copy and paste is NOT ok.

Sierra is the new Windows Vista!

OK, I don't know then. Try reading this thread from the very beginning and see whether any of the expert answers apply to you. I'm not an expert, but some people here are. I'm in High Sierra, which I updated directly into from Yosemite, and the only problems I've had other than what I mistakenly thought was a copy/paste issue have to do with using some nonstandard software that Sierra's tightened security doesn't like, but I found workarounds.

As one of the responders said, if Sierra were so bad as to break copy/paste, they'd have millions of users mad at them, so it has to involve something you're doing that it thinks you shouldn't be that's interfering with copy/paste. There's a way to force quit the copy/paste process and reload it. Again, start at page one of this thread. Good luck!

Ah I feel as if I have come home (i.e. I am not the only one suffering this problem!)

I updated to High Sierra 10.13.3 some time ago but the problem only arose today. I can't copy or paste, either in Pages or Word. When I edit using Word, I get the automatic advice that there isn't enough memory or disc space to perform the function. I can't even copy and paste in the browser window. Hopefully it is a temporary glitch that some update will fix tomorrow. Meanwhile it has got me very worried. Unable to copy and paste is unable to edit text in any meaningful way, and I have a lot of work riding on this. Bugger computers quite frankly. 😕

I found a solution that worked for me:

--------------

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

"

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."

Is this issue fixed ?

I am facing the same issue 😟