CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxclipboardxorg
Joe P.
Joe P.

Reputation: 547

Copy to different user clipboard -Xorg linux

I have a main user that X runs under: username1. I have another user account which I do a lot of work in, username2.
How do I make it so that I can copy the output of a command from userame2 into username1s clipboard.

Here is an example of it failing: 

username2 $ echo "hello" |xclip
    No protocol specified
    Error: Can't open display: :0

Looking online, I found I should change the DISPLAY variable.
Here is what I get after making that change: 

username2 $ echo "hello" |xclip
    Error: Can't open display: myws:0

When searching, I also see that there may be something I will need to do with my .Xauthority file; however I am unfamiliar with it. I will continue to review the documentation.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1905

Answers (1)

PopeJohnPaulII
PopeJohnPaulII

Reputation: 775

Being able to write to another users clipboard would be a HUGE security issue. Luckily there is one user we can trust (or at least we are supposed to), root. So assuming your shell-only user (username2) has root privileges (like sudo).

username2 $ export DISPLAY=:0
username2 $ export XAUTHORITY=/home/username1/.Xauthority
username2 $ echo "hello" | sudo xclip

We set username2's DISPLAY variable to :0 in order to tell X the screen we are dealing with. If you have control of username1 you can simply echo $DISPLAY to see the value, if you don't then you can run the commands w or who to see the value.

Next we set XAUTHORITY=/home/username1/.Xauthority to handle all that authorization/security nonsense. Now username2 can't read this variable but root certainly can (or username1 could chmod a+r ~/.Xauthority to give everyone read access).

Note: Tested on stock Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions