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SnowLeopard.

I commonly use copy in a terminal window to grab stuff I have to paste. A few times in the last few days, the clipboard has gotten 'stuck' on some old text. I do the copy gesture (with keyboard or Edit menu) in the terminal window. I paste somewhere else, and get something other than what I just copied.

If all else fails, I can always tell the terminal to write it's content to a file and use that. But I'm wondering if there's something I'm doing to get into this pickle and if there's any way out.

EDIT

This seems to be provoked by having a great deal of history scrollback on the particular tab. Sometimes the next thing that happens is that Terminal crashes.

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The only times I've had this happen is when I've been working with both my OS-X host and a Windows guest VM. In my case, the alt-keys differ between the two (Cmd-C/Cmd-V and Opt-C/Opt-V) and I'll occasionally use the opposite one. I.e., it's definitely been a "pilot error"; I don't suspect either system in my case. Any chance something similar is happening for you? – JRobert May 24 '10 at 13:21
Nope, virtual box is not running, and I've carefully used both the keyboard shortcut and the Edit menu with the same surprising results. – bmargulies May 24 '10 at 14:54
How much is "a great deal of history"? Also, what is your Scrollback set to in Terminal Preferences? I see mine is set to 10,000 rows, but I don't know if that's self-entered or a default. I've seen MS Excel 2008 be cruelly slow to copy something into the Clipboard, but I've never seen this with Terminal. – khedron May 25 '10 at 3:35
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