How to copy/cut a file (not the contents) to the clipboard in Windows on the command line?

OK, it seems the easiest way was to create a small C# tool that takes arguments and stores them in the clipboard:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections.Specialized;

namespace File2Clip
{
    public class App
    {
        [STAThread]
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            List<string> list = new List<string>();

            string line;
            while(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(line = Console.ReadLine())) list.Add(line);
            foreach (string s in args) list.Add(s);

            StringCollection paths = new StringCollection();
            foreach (string s in list) {
            Console.Write(s);
                paths.Add( 
                    System.IO.Path.IsPathRooted(s) ? 
                      s : 
                      System.IO.Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + 
                        @"\" + s);
            }
            Clipboard.SetFileDropList(paths);
        }
    }
}

2017 edit: Here's a github repo with both source and binary.

This would place the contents of the file into the clipboard (accomplished by clip.exe).

type \path\to\file|clip

To get the actual file, you'll probably have to resort to some other programming language, like VBScript or PowerShell to access Windows API's. I'm not entirely certain what Explorer puts into the clipboard when you CTRL+C a file. I suspect it uses the notification system to do something more intelligent than put the path to the file there. Depending on the context of the CTRL+V, you'll get something (Explorer, Word) or nothing (Notepad).

I've forever wanted this to use in Emacs, so, inspired by this question, an answer here, and a goodly amount of NIH syndrome, I've written a C version available at

https://github.com/roryyorke/picellif

picellif also handles wildcards (it's not clear to me if rostok's C# version does or not).