Clear Clipboard on OS X after 'n' seconds

Question

I tab a lot between tasks and would like to make sure that I do not accidentally paste something where it does not belong. Thus, is there a feature or an app that allows me to auto-clear my clipboard after n seconds or after having pasted n times?

Answer 1

The script below clears the clipboard every S seconds:

#!/bin/sh
# pbclear [seconds]

S=${1:-10}

while true
do
    pbcopy < /dev/null
    sleep $S
done

Save it to a file named pbclear, set executable permissions with chmod +x pbclear, and put it somewhere in your path, for instance, /usr/local/bin. Then run it in the background with pbclear 60 & to clear the clipboard every 60 seconds.

Answer 2

You can use:

pbcopy < /dev/null

Answer 3

Here is the version that will check for clipboard changes every 10 seconds. If there is a change it will clear the clipboard after 10 minutes, but only if there were no new changes in the last 10 minutes.

The reason for this is that a simple solution from https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/331203/41513 may clear the clipboard between you copy something and try to paste it.

#!/bin/bash

clipboard=""
counter=0

while true; do
  # Get the current clipboard content
  new_clipboard=$(pbpaste)

  # Compare the new clipboard content with the previous one
  if [ "$new_clipboard" != "$clipboard" ]; then
    # Clipboard content has changed
    clipboard="$new_clipboard"
    counter=0
  else
    # Clipboard content has not changed
    counter=$((counter+10))

    # If 10 minutes have passed without any changes, clear the clipboard
    if [ $counter -ge 600 ]; then
      echo "Clipboard cleared"
      pbcopy < /dev/null
      clipboard=""
      counter=0
    fi
  fi

  # Wait for 10 seconds before checking the clipboard again
  sleep 10
done