Re^2: A Christmas detour: it's the simplest damn things that bite us sometimes

[hippo]

Another idea for a cool project. :/

It is, but it also might be worth seeing if the already written xsel will do what you want first. As per the man page it works on the primary X selection by default (the others can be chosen in the options/arguments) but as that's what I use 99% of the time I find it very useful. eg.

$ xsel -o | perl -ple '$_=uc'

There are plenty more useful things you can do with xsel. Enjoy!