Is it possible to update the clipboard programmatically?

[SmudgeSpot]

I would like to know if there is any way to update the clipboard programmatically.

I have a background script that runs on the Mac side that grabs info from a network server and puts the info onto the clipboard.

The info is properly placed into the Mac clipboard but not in the Windows clipboard.

The problem is that the Windows (VM) clipboard is only updated from the Mac (Host) when I click out of the VM then back into the VM.

I really don't want to have to switch back and forth so I would like to find some way to tell Fusion (via my background script) to pull the info from the Mac clipboard.

Anyone know if this is possible?

Thanks

[wila]

Hello JBingham,

While there might be ways to work around that, it will still be a bit prone to errors and to be fair I'm not aware of a fail proof work around.

You're probably better off by writing straight to a file in the guest OS.

You can do that via the vmrun command which is to be found at: /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library

If you run it without parameters you get a list of what you can do with it.

If you do not want to use vmrun then you can probably also just write to a file share that can be accessed from within the guest OS.

hope this helps,

--

Wil

[SmudgeSpot]

Thanks for the reply.  Although the vmrun utility could be helpful in the future, it won't work for my needs.

However, I found MouseTools that will do what I need.  At the end of my background script, I use MouseTools to

• get the current position of the mouse
• click out of the VM (clicks just below the Apple in the menu bar on the main screen)
• sleep .5 seconds
• click back to the original position

So now when I need to grab the data from the server, I just have to press the F-key that runs the script, wait a few seconds, and the data is magically available on the clipboard within the VM.  Simply paste and TADA!

If anyone comes up with a better/direct method (like if vmrun is updated with a getClipboardFromHost method), please post a reply.