How to access the Clipboard?

[ADT]

I have no idea how to do this;

I want to code a program that does the following;

When I copy a piece of text in an X windows application (eg firefox) I want my program to be able to take the text from the clipboard and put it into a text file.

I can't do this because I don't know how to get at this 'piece of text' in the clipboard.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Jussi Kukkonen]

In python you'd do this:

import os
s = popen('xsel').read()

More info on X clipboard should be here www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.txt, but freedesktop.org has some server problems at the moment...

[ADT]

Thanks, I never tried python before but I'll give it a shot.

[WW]

That should be

import os
s = os.popen('xsel').read()

Also xsel is not installed by default. You'll have to install it first, e.g.

sudo apt-get install xsel

(or use Synaptic). You will have to enable the universe repository, if you haven't already.

[crfaldu1]

xsel >> file.txt

This will append the current selection to file.txt. One can even assign short cut (keyboard binding) to run this command. I use it all the time to same notes on things I read

[arunkumar413]

how to assign the shortcut key?

[yuler]

There are multiple ways to accomplish this. Running a Bash script is one way. Bash is the default shell program in Ubuntu. A shell interprets command line input.

The Bash Reference Manual
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
Greg's Wiki Chet Ramey's Bash Page
Bash Hackers Wiki
List of Bash online-tutorials
[Bash Hackers Wiki]

With a Bash script, you can use the xclip command line utility to redirect clipboard data to a file. Xclip is in the Software Center.

xclip -o -sel clip > filename

If you want to automatically increment the filename, put the routine inside a loop.

The script can also avoid overwriting files, or assign the name to a formula that will never create a duplicate filename, such as according to the date and time (e.g. filename2011-08-24-122308). You can assign this Bash script to a hotkey, icon, activate upon startup, start/stop under certain conditions, etc.

[hakermania]

For anyone following:
In c++ you can see qclipboard lib for info

[majedaly]

you can also try xclip.
you can use `xclip -o` inside of a command as well

[ofnuts]

Just wondering, is there also a way to set the clipboard from a script?

(I haven't ready any of the aforementioned docs yet).