Terminal - copy from CLI without using mouse

Question

While firing commands in CLI, I want to copy the command I just fired or anything I wrote in terminal and paste it somewhere else without using mouse.

Like in following picture, I want to copy the update command (completely or partially) without using mouse and paste it somewhere.

Answer 1

You can use screen(1) within your terminal emulator of choice (xterm, gnome-terminal, ...).

The functionality you need is built-in in screen. You need to get familiar with the way it works:

• by default, the "command" keybinding is Ctrl + A, you compose commands by issuing the "command" sequence plus the specific action.
• the "copy" command is: AltGr + [
• the "paste" command is AltGr + ]

You can "copy" the command and "paste" in another terminal.

screen is fun and once you start using it you'll wonder how it is possible you haven't been using it at all.

Answer 2

In addition to the answers already provided, you could consider moving to a more flexible terminal emulator.

If you were prepared to change terminals to rxvt-unicode, you could use a tool like urxvt-perls: a collection of scripts that provide the following keyboard functionality in that terminal emulator:

• select, copy and paste text
• forward and reverse search
• highlight and open URLs in your preferred browser

You simply install the package and then add a few lines to your ~/.Xresources, and you can then unplug the rodent for good.

Answer 3

You can do this using a program like xclip:

NAME
   xclip - command line interface to X selections (clip‐
   board)

Once you have installed it, you can use it to connect to your X clipboard. Unfortunately, this won't work in your mysql environment (it has its own buffer for copied lines) but it will if you want to run a 'normal' command. For example :

$ This is a long command line

Type CtrlA to go to the beginning of the line, enclose the command in quotes then echo it:

$ echo -e "This is a long command line" |xclip 

You now have "This is a long command line" in your middle click clipboard.

If you want to paste without using a mouse, it will depend on where you are pasting. You can paste into another terminal by running:

$ xclip -o

You can paste into the same terminal, simply by killing (cutting) the command with CtrlK and then pasting with CtrlY.

You can also save commands across terminals using bash's history. Add this line to your ~/.bashrc:

PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a; history -r'

PROMPT_COMMAND is a special bash variable. If it is set the value is executed as a command before issuing a new prompt. history -a will write the history of the current session to the history file and history -r will reload that file. This means that every command you run will be immediately written to the history file.

Now when you run a long command line, you can switch to another terminal and hit return (just to run $PROMT_COMMAND, alternatively, open a new terminal window) and it will be accessible to this terminal's history. If you now hit Up you can run it on the new terminal.

Answer 4

@evilsoup has suggested a good solution but it breaks often.

A Quick Solution

Here is a solution that never breaks.

history | tail -2 | head -1 | xclip -selection clipboard

Just run this command and it will copy the command you just ran to the clipboard.

Basically, what it does is that it prints your command history and takes the second last command and feeds it to your clipboard (the last command is this itself, so it selects the second last command).

A Custom Function

Developing on the quick solution,here is a small function I wrote which is pretty smart and will copy the last used command. You can also provide numerical arguments to copy the last-nth command. E.g. for copying the second last command provide 2 as argument

myclipcopy () {

  if [ -z $1 ]
    then  # if no argument was provided then just copy the last used command
    history | tail -2 | head -1 | sed -re 's/[[:space:]]+[[:digit:]]+[[:space:]]+//g' | xclip -selection clipboard
    echo 'Anyways, the following command has been copied:'
    history | tail -2 | head -1| sed -re 's/[[:space:]]+[[:digit:]]+[[:space:]]+//g'

  else
    myindex=$(( $1+1 ))
    history | tail -$myindex | head -1 | sed -re 's/[[:space:]]+[[:digit:]]+[[:space:]]+//g' | xclip -selection clipboard
    echo "The following command has been copied:"
    history | tail -$myindex | head -1 | sed -re 's/[[:space:]]+[[:digit:]]+[[:space:]]+//g'
  fi

  #Delete this command itself from the history
  myhisnum=$(history | tail -1 | grep -oP '\s\d+\s' | grep -oP '\d+'); history -d $myhisnum
}

Copy-paste the above function in your ~/.bashrc file. Note that if you put this in a separate bash script file, and run the script, it wouldn't work as the history command would not be able to access your history in that case.

Finally, run it as:

myclipcopy 3
# This copies the third-last command

Moreover, one cool feature added to this function is that it deletes itself from the history after it is run. This is helpful because then the "backward" index of the commands doesn't change.

Answer 5

This command uses bash's history expansion (so !! expands into the last line you typed into the terminal). You will probably have to install either xclip or xsel.

echo "!!" | xclip -selection clipboard

echo "!!" | xsel -i --clipboard

This will put your last command in the Ctrl+v clipboard, so you will be able to paste in into any GUI program (or with Ctrl+Shift+v in most terminal emulators, or with "+p in vim).

This will break for some lines containing double quotes, for example:

$ echo "foo;bar"
foo;bar
$ echo "!!"
echo "echo "foo;bar""
echo foo
The program 'bar' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install bar

It will work for the command you gave as an example though; you should only have problems if the double-quotes are escaping ; & && | || and so on.

Answer 6

Maybe not the most convenient solution but I use it and so it can be helpful for others more it doesn't require any additional soft installation.

1. You need to create a temporary file at any convenient directory

2. Transfer required direction or text to that file. For transferring direction you can use

   echo $(pwd) 1> tempo
   

3. To get direction from the file use command

   cd $(tail -n 1 tempo)
   

For copying and pasting commands this system will work either of course. Hope that was helpful

Answer 7

$ emacs -g '80x24' --eval '(term "/bin/bash")'

C-c C-k    char mode
C-c C-j    line mode
C-space    Selecting text in terminal without using the mouse
M-w        copy to X11 clipboard

where C = Ctrl and M = Alt.