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https://github.com/trwyant/perl-mac-pasteboard

Manipulate Mac OS X pasteboards (a.k.a. clipboards)
https://github.com/trwyant/perl-mac-pasteboard

clipboard mac-osx perl perl-module

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Manipulate Mac OS X pasteboards (a.k.a. clipboards)

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README 

        
Mac-Pasteboard is Copyright (C) 2008, 2011-2024 by Thomas R. Wyant, III



DESCRIPTION



This XS module accesses Mac OS X pasteboards, which can be thought of as

clipboards with bells and whistles. System-defined pasteboards can be

accessed, and user-defined pasteboards can be created and accessed. Each

pasteboard can contain multiple items of data, and each item can contain

multiple 'flavors.'



NOTE that Mac OS X appears to restrict pasteboard access to processes

that are logged in interactively. Ssh sessions and cron jobs can not

create the requisite pasteboard handles, giving coreFoundationUnknownErr

(-4960).



Flavors (Apple's technical term) correspond more or less to MIME types,

but are specified as Uniform Type Identifiers, which look like Internet

domain names, but reversed. A number of these are recognized by the

system, and organized into a hierarchy. More-specific members of the

hierarchy are considered to 'conform to' less-specific members, or not,

as the case may be. For instance, 'public.utf16-plain-text' conforms to

'public.plain-text', which in turn conforms to 'public.text'. But none

of them conforms to 'public.image'.  Conformance is transitive, so

'public.utf16-plain-text' also conforms to 'public.plain-text', and so

on.



This module makes all these features available to the user, but is (I

hope!) organized in such a way that the user who does not wish to deal

with them need not do so, since defaults are provided to cover what the

author suspects to be the most common case: manipulating plain text on

the system clipboard.



The programming interface is object-oriented. Each object represents a

pasteboard, with the default being the system clipboard. Item ID is an

attribute of the object rather than a method argument, with the default

(undef) being special-cased to write to item ID 1, but read from the

most recent ID. Flavor _is_ an argument, but defaults to

'com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text', which is the flavor used by the

'pbcopy' and 'pbpaste' executables provided with Mac OS X. A couple

convenience subroutines (pbcopy() and pbpaste()) are provided to make

things even simpler, and are exported by default. Also exported on

demand are various manifest constants: pasteboard names, flavor and

status flags, and pasteboard-related error codes.



INSTALLATION



This module is installable by either of the two usual incantations:



  tar -xzf Mac-Pasteboard-9.999.tar.gz

  cd Mac-Pasteboard-9.999

  perl Makefile.PL

  make

  make test

  sudo make install



or



  tar -xzf Mac-Pasteboard-9.999.tar.gz

  cd Mac-Pasteboard-9.999

  perl Build.PL

  ./Build

  ./Build test

  sudo ./Build install



DEPENDENCIES



This module requires these other modules and libraries:



  Scalar::Util 1.01 or later (in core since 5.8).



This module also requires Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) or above. Because it is

an XS module, you will need to install X Code tools. This probably came

with your Mac, but updates are available from the Apple Developer

Connection, http://developer.apple.com/.



LICENSING INFORMATION



This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it

under the same terms as Perl 5.10.0. For more details, see the full text

of the licenses in the directory LICENSES.



This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but

without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of

merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.