How might I pass text data from the ruby console into my clipboard without saving to a file?

You can just echo it instead if there are no newline characters in the string; otherwise, use the IO class.

Using echo:

system "echo #{stringdata} | pbcopy"

OR

`echo #{stringdata} | pbcopy`

Ruby will then just rip the text from memory, inject it into the shell command which opens a pipe between the echo and pbcopy processes.

Using the IO class:

If you want to do it the Ruby way, we simply create a pipe with pbcopy using the IO class. This creates a shared files between the processes which we write to, and pbcopy will read from.

IO.popen("pbcopy", "w") { |pipe| pipe.puts "Hello world!" }