Chap Harrison wrote:
This question may well be non-specific to Cygwin, and perhaps more of
an SSH or a Unix shell question. If you can suggest a better forum
I'd appreciate it!
The task is to fill out an Excel worksheet, copy a rectangular portion
to the Windows clipboard, have a script read the clipboard, transform
the data, and write the results back out to the Windows clipboard so
that the user can then paste it into a text document.
Why are you trying to deal with a very manual, step by step, point and
click method of thinking and doing? The basic task here is to get data
from an Excel worksheet (which is not a good input method to start with)
to a text file. There are programmatic ways to do this. You can, for
example, extract data from an Excel spreadsheet using Perl.
From Cygwin, I can get at the clipboard through /dev/clipboard - very
handy indeed! Only problem is that this requires that Cygwin be
running in the same copy of Windows from which I'm doing the cutting
and pasting. This turns out to be a hard sell to management, who'd
prefer that I keep Cygwin running in its own Windows environment.
This part didn't parse for me. Wouldn't running Cygwin on the machine
you are doing the cutting and pasting be it's own Windows environment?!?
I've set up ssh and can now start a PuTTY session from my Excel world
into my Cygwin world (which is fine - a lot my scripts *don't* require
reading/writing the clipboard).
Why's Putty involved? Cygwin has OpenSSH.
I'm wondering how to send a script invocation followed by the
clipboard data that the script will read and transform. I know how to
use ssh to send a command to a remote system; I can do that from DOS.
But is there any way to say "run this command and, by the way, the
data it needs is right behind it"? Sort of like an input redirection
with a HERE-doc, to put it very loosely?
If we are playing fast and lose then couldn't you:
$ cat /dev/clipboard > /tmp/$$
$ scp /tmp/$$ <remoteSystem>:/tmp/$$
$ rm /tmp/$$
$ ssh <remoteSystem> <script> < /tmp/$$
I hope that makes some sense. And, obviously, the problem is not
really about "clipboards" per se, but rather any input stream.
If it's not about clipboards or Excel for that matter then why are you
introducing that complexity. Simply put the data in a file and
manipulate the file...
--
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I
realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked
Him to forgive me.
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