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» Access klipper clipboard on CLI under KDE4

Wed, 08/13/2008 - 23:12

Here’s a little script you can save in your path and do things like

  1. # paste current clipboard into file
  2. clipboard > "some_file"
  3. # copy some file into clipboard
  4. cat "some_file" | clipboard

Actually I find it rather useful so I thought I will have to share it.

Since KDE4 D-BUS is used throughout KDE and thus in Klipper as well. IMO they should really rework the output of dbus-send or add some more flags (what about --quiet). Well that’s the reason why the script below is somewhat long. But nothing a little bit of bash+awk magic couldn’t cope with:

  1. #!/bin/bash
  2.  
  3. # check for stdin
  4. #   since we don't want to wait endlessly we set a timeout
  5. #   a pity `read` only supports seconds and no fractions...
  6. read -t 1 stdin
  7. if [[ "$stdin" != "" ]]; then
  8.   # get the rest of stdin
  9.   stdin=$stdin$(cat)
  10.   # oh, nice - user input! we set that as current
  11.   # clipboard content
  12.   dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=org.kde.klipper \
  13.     /klipper org.kde.klipper.klipper.setClipboardContents \
  14.     string:"$stdin"
  15.   exit
  16. fi
  17.  
  18. # if we reach this point no user input was given and we
  19. #   print out the current contents of the clipboard
  20. # note: I hate the output of dbus, dcop was much easier in that regard!
  21. dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.kde.klipper /klipper \
  22.     org.kde.klipper.klipper.getClipboardContents | awk '
  23.       BEGIN { output = ""; }
  24.       {
  25.         if ( NR > 1 ) {
  26.           output = output $0 "\n";
  27.         }
  28.       }
  29.       END {
  30.         print substr(output, 12, length(output) - 13);
  31.       }'

As usually, save the file (attached below) in your $PATH and make it executable.

PS: Thanks to Martin Vidner for his article on D-BUS btw. - it gave me the proper dbus commands.