There is an elusive bug in the VirtualBox client software, which on rare occasions causes the clipboard to stop working. I've seen the issue with both Windows and Linux guests, and I've developed workarounds by writing tiny scripts that reset the client software. However, my standard Devuan client has not been easy to do this with. Over years of experimenting and often just manually restarting the client, I've finally found out what makes this work reliably:
- On Devuan, and possibly other Debian derivatives, when the client gets restarted, it creates 2 processes instead of one. You have to delete the 2nd process (but not the 1st) and then everything works as expected.
- Also there needs to be a pause while the original failed client is being killed, otherwise the new client doesn't always work.
So here is a lil script I wrote to solve the problem. I call it "byeclipboard.sh" and I put the following lines in a bash script, made it executable. When the issue occurs, it's only a couple seconds to run the script and have my copy-paste clipboard working again:
echo 'ending VBoxClient process...'
pkill -9 VBoxClient
echo
echo 'sleeping...'
sleep 1
echo
echo 'starting new VBoxClient...'
VBoxClient --clipboard
echo
echo 'show process says this:'
ps -aux|grep VBoxClient
echo
echo 'ending duplicate...'
kill $(ps -aux|grep VBoxClient|grep ' S '| awk '{print $2}')
echo
echo 'show process now says this:'
ps aux | grep -v grep | grep 'VBoxClient --clipboard'
echo
echo 'all done.'
And for those who are curious, here's what it looks like when it runs:
./byeclipboard.sh ending VBoxClient process... sleeping... starting new VBoxClient... 12:44:27.701746 main VBoxClient 7.2.2 r170484 (verbosity: 0) linux.amd64 (Sep 10 2025 18:43:28) release log 12:44:27.701747 main Log opened 2025-12-04T12:44:27.701741000Z 12:44:27.701763 main OS Product: Linux 12:44:27.701765 main OS Release: 5.10.0-35-amd64 12:44:27.701766 main OS Version: #1 SMP Debian 5.10.237-1 (2025-05-19) 12:44:27.701769 main Executable: /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-7.2.2/bin/VBoxClient 12:44:27.701769 main Process ID: 7434 12:44:27.701769 main Package type: LINUX_64BITS_GENERIC 12:44:27.701773 main VBoxClient 7.2.2 r170484 started. Verbose level = 0 12:44:27.702449 main Session type is: VBGHDISPLAYSERVERTYPE_X11 12:44:27.702459 main Service: Shared Clipboard 12:44:27.702488 main Daemonizing service ... show process says this: clearhat 7437 0.0 0.0 18736 360 ? S 06:44 0:00 VBoxClient --clipboard clearhat 7439 0.0 0.0 6240 648 pts/0 S+ 06:44 0:00 grep VBoxClient clearhat 7440 0.0 0.0 217516 4168 ? Sl 06:44 0:00 VBoxClient --clipboard ending duplicate... show process now says this: clearhat 7440 0.0 0.0 217548 4216 ? Sl 06:44 0:00 VBoxClient --clipboard all done.
Have fun!
