Ok here's what I want to do. I just downloaded a console-based download accelator (Axel), and I want to be able to copy a link in Firefox, then type a specific key combination which will pop open an xterm with axel downloading the file. My problem is, I can't figure out how to get a console program to read the clipboard.
I did find mention of one program called wpaste (I could use it with the command 'axel $(wpaste)'), that used to come with WindowMaker, but doesn't seem to anymore. RPM find says it's in windowmaker 0.81, I think, but I have WindowMaker 0.91, and I don't have it. And I really don't want to downgrade my version of WindowMaker (even though I only occasionally use it).
So, does anyone know anyway for the console to be able to read the clipboard in the way I've described?

hi,
these are some fairly interesting utilities
http://cvs.windowmaker.org/co.php/wm/util/wxpaste.c
just put the source code in a clean directory and comment out
// #include "../src/config.h"
and compile with
gcc -o wxpaste -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 wxpaste.c
it doesn't need any of windowmaker
however i don't think this is going to do what you want
it only seems to grab stuff from the same term it's run in ?
also appears to grap emacs yanks
but not copy from qt or gtk apps
there might be something i'm missing and i'm abslutely sure it could be easily fixed to use
qt or gtk paste as a command line option


just for fun you might mess with it and see if you can get it to do more

Yeah, I've got wxpaste, and wxcopy. As you say, it only copies and pastes from one terminal. It doesn't interact with the X clipboard. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
Luckily, I finally found what I was looking for a little while before you posted. It's called xclip. It copies from stdin to the X-clipboard, and pastes from the X-clipboard to stdout. It's exactly what I needed. Now I'll just have to write a script to tell it where to download the files according to their extension. That won't be too hard.