Wayland: Auto-clean clipboard

Wayland has the safety feature of clearing the clipboard if you close the source window (where the content was copied from). Password managers (like KeePass) also give you only a few seconds to paste the password somewhere before clearing the clipboard. But in day-to-day life, you might need to copy secrets and tokens outside a password manager. To prevent accidental pastes, these values should not stay in the clipboard forever. A manual attempt is to overwrite the clipboard by copying something harmless afterwards, but that’s not very fault-tolerant. The automatic solution is to clear the clipboard if the last copy action is older than a certain delay.

sudo apt install wl-clipboard

Executable file /usr/local/bin/clipboard-cleaner-handler:

#!/bin/dash

# remove previous delay handlers
pgrep -f -x "/bin/dash $0" | grep -v ^$$\$ | while read pid ; do 
    kill $pid
done

sleep 45  # <- the delay
wl-copy -c
echo cleared clipboard

Executable file /usr/local/bin/clipboard-cleaner:

#!/bin/dash
wl-paste -w /bin/dash -c '/usr/local/bin/clipboard-cleaner-handler &'

Finally put clipboard-cleaner into autostart.

How does it work: wl-paste watches for clipboard copy events and executes clipboard-cleaner-handler each time without blocking the listening. clipboard-cleaner-handler first removes all invocations of itself from previous copy events. Then it waits for the delay before cleaning the clipboard. That way, only the last triggered delay actually counts.

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