How can I install xclip on an EC2 instance?

I’m following Github’s instructions for adding an SSH key. I’ve generated the id_rsa.pub file from my AWS EC2 instance, but I cannot complete the step that has me copy the contents of the file using xclip because I cannot install xclip onto the EC2 instance.

1. I tried to install xclip on the EC2 instance using sudo yum install xclip, but that didn’t work (“No package xclip available”).
2. So I looked around and found more detailed install instructions, but they didn’t work either (“curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found”), and the suggested correct URLs in the comments also failed.
3. (I also tried just copying the text contents of the id_rsa.pub file using Putty and ctl-c, but Github declared the resulting key invalid.)

So, how do I install xclip on 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2012.09?

Answer

I needed this today for a file larger than a ssh-key, and cat was not enough. You need to enable the EPEL repo in EC2 in order to get xclip:

wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
sudo yum-config-manager --enable epel
sudo yum install xclip -y