Mac-Pasteboard is Copyright (C) 2008, 2011-2023 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.