I'm not sure that can be done in a "universal manner". Think about how the clipboard works...it needs X11. In a console, for instance, I use "midnight commander's clipboard", which saves it's content to a file in ~/.mc.

In X you have the "mouse clipboard" and the "X clipboard" and sometimes the internal clipboards of each application. In Windows, the consoles and the Window's are tightly integrated, but in linux, they are totally separate.

I would go to freshmeat and search for "clipboard", then see how they do it.