Copying text from a terminal

Most mature terminal emulators permit users to copy or save their contents.

General approach

In graphical terminal emulators, contents are typically selectable by mouse, and can then be copied using the context menu, Edit menu or a key combination such as Ctrl+Shift+c.

Terminals without CLIPBOARD selection

Xorg

Some emulators do not support the CLIPBOARD selection natively, and copy data to the PRIMARY selection. For them xclip may be used:

$ xclip -o | xclip -selection clipboard -i

The above command reads data from the PRIMARY selection and writes it to CLIPBOARD selection.

Other clipboard managers such as autocutsel^AUR provide automatic synchronization between selection buffers.

Wayland

Utilities like wl-clipboard and clipboard^AUR can copy data to the Wayland clipboard:

$ command 2>&1 | wl-copy

Intercepting commands output

Use tee to intercept the output of a command.

$ command 2>&1 | tee output-file

After the command is executed, output-file will contain its output, while having displayed the output at the same time.

Accessing Linux terminal backlog

The backlog of a native terminal named /dev/ttyN may be accessed via /dev/vcsN. Hence, if one is working in /dev/tty1, the following snippet will let store the backlog in a file output-file:

# cat /dev/vcs1 > output-file

Comparison of common emulators

Unless the "Key combination" column states otherwise, the key combination is Ctrl+Shift+c.

Emulator	Select to PRIMARY	CLIPBOARD
Emulator	Select to PRIMARY	Key combination	Context menu	Window menu	Select
Alacritty	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
aterm^AUR	Yes	No	No	No	No
eterm^AUR	Yes	No	No	No	No
foot	Yes	Yes	No	No	Optional
germinal^AUR	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Guake	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Konsole	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Optional
lilyterm-git^AUR	Yes	Yes `Ctrl+Delete`	Yes	No	No
lxterminal	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
mate-terminal	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
mlterm^AUR	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
pantheon-terminal	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
PuTTY	Yes	No	No	No	No
qterminal	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
roxterm^AUR	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
rxvt-unicode	Yes	Yes `Ctrl+Alt+c`	No	No	Optional
sakura	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
st	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Terminator	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
terminology	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Termite	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Tilda	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
xfce4-terminal	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
xterm	Yes	Optional	No	No	Yes
Yakuake	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Optional

Special cases

putty

The xclip approach works for putty: one just has to remember that the xclip invocation should be done on the local computer (in another terminal), not on the remote machine to which putty is connected.

urxvt

Selecting text to CLIPBOARD requires the selection-to-clipboard perl extension. See rxvt-unicode#Clipboard for details.

xterm

Access to the CLIPBOARD selection in xterm requires additional steps.

mlterm

In addition to Ctrl+Shift+c, you can use Ctrl+Insert if you do not want to kill processes accidentally.

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