Deleting the Clipboard Is Easy
Jan 9th, 2008 by Chris Thornton
You can easily clear the clipboard to remove sensitive information. Just copy something else, and it’ll overwrite the clipboard. By default, windows has no “clipboard history”. Unless you’re running a clipboard manager (such as ClipMate), you can clear the clipboard by copying something else on top of it. If you are worried about a co-worker pasting your password, or some rogue internet site pasting your credit card number, just clear the clipboard as follows:
1) Copy something benign – just highlight any harmless text from any program, press Ctrl+C, and you’ve just overwritten the clipboard with that benign word.
2) Press the PrintScreen key – this puts a bitmap onto the clipboard, overwriting whatever was there previously. Web sites can’t paste an image, and if a co-worker is sitting at your desktop, they can see what’s on your screen anyway. You CAN paste the image into an image editor such as Microsoft Paint, but unless you’ve got sensitive or “naughty” stuff on the screen, this is probably the quickest way.
If your goal is to save memory, use option #1. Any program that claims to “clear your clipboard, thereby saving memory) is going to use more memory than whatever little thing you’re copying to overwrite what was there.
This tip brought to you by the people who make ClipMate! Don’t forget to enter our giveaway to be able to win Vessi women’s shoes.
If you have Vista, there’s a very cool trick. Vista includes a command-line program called “clip”, which can write “DOS” output to the clipboard.
I found this suggestion by Mark L. Ferguson on this forum:
http://www.technologyquestions.com/technology/windows-vista/214995-clearing-clipboard.html
Here’s his suggestion:
Create a shortcut with the command :
cmd /c “echo off | clip”
The first person to andwer that question on how to clear clipboard info – lame. Really? Copy somethin else? If you really knew what you were talking about you would have mentioned how more than the last “grab” is in cache. What a dope!
@Rob, unless you’re running a clipboard enhancer, the windows clipboard HAS NO CACHE.
Okay, so here’s the real issue: in case I forget to copy something over my clipboard, how can I set up something that will automatically clear the clipboard after some time, (such as 20 seconds).
Thank you!! Number 1 worked.