And of course you can, with the built-in clip.exe utility in Windows 7 or Vista. It’s not really meant for clearing the clipboard, but with a little command line magic in a shortcut, we can make it do just that.
Note: This is also useful if you copied a very large amount of data to the clipboard and you don’t want it wasting memory anymore.
Create a Shortcut Icon to Clear the Clipboard
Right-click on the desktop or elsewhere, and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.
Then in the shortcut location box, enter the following command:
At this point you’ll have an icon that will immediately clear the clipboard… but we can tweak it a bit further.
Right-click on the icon and choose Properties, and then change the Run drop-down to “Minimized” to make sure you don’t see the command prompt. You can also assign a shortcut key here.
If you click the Change Icon button and then browse down to this file, you can find a clipboard icon:
Now we’ve got a nice-looking icon that will clear out the clipboard:
Note: If you are using Windows XP, you can download clip.exe from Microsoft. Just save the file in the Windows directory and the rest of the hack should work for you.
