Thanks for this!!
I just realized I can use the following command to OCR a bitmap in the clipboard and put the text back into the clipboard.
xclip -out -selection clipboard -t image/bmp
| tesseract stdin stdout -l eng
| xclip -in -selection clipboard
This works in my linux VM (in Virtualbox on my work laptop) using bi-directional shared clipboard without touching my Windows software.
Mind blown!!