Is there a way to programatically copy and paste to an RDP?

Question

I am looking to write a quick script to send one file (that I change often) from my workstation (windows7 OS) to a remote server (windows server 2012) via the RDP client.

Ideally, I am looking to instantiate the rdpclip.exe process with some arguments. Something like: rdpclip.exe -f [fileToCopyFromLocalToRemote] but to my knowledge (and a brief google search) there is no such equivalent.

Also, I am not looking for any third party tools to do this!

Answer 1

You can use PowerShell to put file to clipboard:

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
$f = New-Object System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection
$f.Add("D:\tmp\mypic1.bmp")
[System.Windows.Forms.Clipboard]::SetFileDropList($f)

Answer 2

If you intend to stay connected to the RDP session, then you can map a drive on your connection which can make your local drive available to the remote computer. This is on Remote Desktop's Local Resources tab under the More... button.

Once that is enabled, you can make a scheduled task to copy files. You can access the local drives from the special share name \\tsclient\c or whichever drive you are trying to access, as described in this TechNet article. So a sample script that you would run on the remote computer might look something like this:

IF EXIST "\\tsclient\c\Mydir\MyFile" copy /Y "\\tsclient\c\Mydir\MyFile" "C:\Syncrhonized\MyDir\MyFile"

You could put this in as a scheduled task to run every few minutes or so. Be aware of a potential problem if other people remote in to this computer with drive mappings and file structure. Your script won't know which computer is the right one, unless you throw some sort of logic in to check that.

Answer 3

According to my research rdpclip.exe doesn't accept any command line arguments. To use it in order to programmatically copy files is apparently not intended.

Since Windows Vista robocopy is part of every Windows installation. I don't know how you wanna use rdpclip.exe to transfer a file to the remote host. But my first thought was to mount a netshare, use robocopy to transfer a file and dismount the netshare. In an script it will look like:

net use \\Server\Sharename /USER:[username] [passwort]
robocopy [Source] [Destination]
net use \\Servername\Sharename /del

Answer 4

As you say that you cannot share your local hard disk with the server, the only sharing mechanism that is left is the clipboard.

If the clipboard is shareable over the RDP connection, you may use the open-source project Clipboard RDC.

This project consists of a very small Java program that is launched on both sides of the connection. The client-side program is used to encode a file and load it to the clipboard, while the server-side program decodes and stores it in a local file. The limitation here is that the file must be small enough to fit on the clipboard.

As it stands, this is more work than you wanted to do. But you can modify this simple program and separate it into two parts :

1. A client-side program that will accept a file-path as parameter and place the encoded file on the clipboard.
2. A server-side program that will loop, testing every few seconds for the presence of such a file on the clipboard, decoding and storing it in the folder.

As these will be your own programs that you fully control, you could add features such as adding the destination path to the information that you place on the clipboard, so that this becomes a general-purpose tool for automatically transferring multiple small-enough files from client to server.