The clipboard enables the user to move data in a single application or exchange data between applications. Typically, a user selects data in the application using the mouse or keyboard, and then initiates a cut, copy, or paste operation on that selection.
Descriptions of these operations are in the following table:
┌───────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │Operation │Description │ ├───────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │Cut │Deletes the selected data from the │ │ │application and copies it to the clipboard. │ │ │Any previous contents of the clipboard are │ │ │destroyed. │ ├───────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │Copy │Copies the selected data to the clipboard. │ │ │The selection remains unchanged. Previous │ │ │contents of the clipboard are destroyed. │ ├───────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │Paste │Deletes the selected data from the │ │ │application and replaces it with the contents│ │ │of the clipboard. The contents of the │ │ │clipboard are not changed. │ └───────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
An application should not perform any clipboard operations unless the user initiates them explicitly. Other OS/2 features, such as pipes, queues, shared memory, and especially DDE should be used when data exchange is needed without user involvement. For example, an application that continuously passes remotely collected data to a data-analysis application must not use the clipboard. Such an application, instead, should use the other interprocess data-communication capabilities of the operating system.
The data on the clipboard is maintained in memory only. Clipboard data is lost when the computer is turned off.