Read the desktop clipboard

What is on the clipboard of the computer’s desktop — the CLIPBOARD selection, which is what Ctrl-C writes and Ctrl-V pastes.

This reads the selection out of the console user’s graphical session, so it needs no reboot and no permission from a browser — which is what makes it the route to build on if you want to write it once. The other way text crosses — RFB extended cut text over the desktop websocket — is faster and live, and needs a virtio-serial channel a computer only acquires on a COLD boot; see Vnc.url.

It does have ONE requirement of the image, and it is a 400 rather than something that clears: the guest needs xclip on an X11 desktop, or wl-clipboard (wl-paste/wl-copy) on a Wayland one. Every golden built since August 2026 carries it, so in practice this is a computer created before then — and a computer keeps the image it was created from, so the fix is to install that tool in the guest, which you can do yourself since you have root there, or to create a new computer from an image that includes it. The refusal says so in as many words, and carries reason: "unsupported". Do not retry it: unlike the 409s below it will never start working.

It is a READ, not a subscription. Nothing here notices a Ctrl-C in the guest on its own, and this call does not resume a suspended computer: what somebody copied is not worth waking a machine for. A computer that is stopped or suspended answers 409 with reason: "unavailable" — the one 409 here that never clears by waiting, because starting the computer is something only you can do. Some others carry starting (the guest agent has not answered inside its boot window yet) or contention (its guest agent is busy with another call), and both of those are worth sending again. Desktop-session and X-server failures carry no reason: the platform cannot distinguish a guest still booting from a logged-out desktop, crashed window manager, or persistently unreachable display, so it does not guess that retrying will help. Switch on reason, not on the sentence.

At most 128 KiB comes out, and more than that is refused with a 413 rather than truncated — a half a password is not less of an answer, it is a wrong one that looks completely normal. The write cap is different and smaller; see the PUT.

Needs the member role despite being a read, for the reason GET /files does: what somebody last copied is not a read of anything this platform models, and a key or a password is the ordinary case rather than the unlucky one.

Windows guests are refused outright — there is no way to run anything in the interactive session there yet.

Requires the member role or higher.