> hate to discourage you from writing Ruby, but have you tried VNC's
> cross-machine clipboard thingie? if you hit F8 in a VNC viewer, there
> are two options, "clipboard local -> remote" and "clipboard remote ->
> local" that might work for you

Not in the slightest!  There's no way you could ever discourage me from
writing Ruby :-).

It makes sense that VNC would provide this kind of facility; I just didn't
know it existed.

This is the sort of thing I was hoping for when I explained what I was trying
to do.

Of course, I'd still be interested to read some code that does UDP
broadcast using Ruby, since that's something that could be useful one of
these days ... and would be interesting, even if I now have no specific
use for it.

Thanks for the quick solution !!