How do I select all text from a file with nano?

Question

I open a file in Ubuntu nano editor from the comand line and I want to copy all the contents of the file so I can paste it in an another application outside the shell.

So far I can only copy using shift on the screen that is visible but not on all content.

Answer 1

You can't use the buffer of nano to use it elsewhere, you need to use the buffer of X or Gnome.

xclip is the solution.

A command line interface to the X11 clipboard. It can also be used for copying files, as an alternative to sftp/scp, avoiding password prompts when X11 forwarding has already been setup.

Answer 2

Have you tried this: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/xclip-linux-insert-files-command-output-intoclipboard/

It isn't within nano, but you could cat the file into xclip with: cat test.txt | xclip

Answer 3

Actually, this answer might be a bit late but I was looking for an answer for the same question and I just figured it out. when you have the file you want to copy to open in nano. you can hit ctl-R and enter the file you want copied from. this will bring in the whole file.

In my case I was just copying my old fstab so it wasn't a big deal. but could get ridiculous with huge files.

Answer 4

There is a possible way:

• Cursor at the beginning of a file

• Ctrl6 to set a mark

• AltShiftT (or try AltT) to cut to the end of the file

• If AltT doesn't work, try CtrlK

Answer 5

From my understanding it is not possible to select an entire file in nano if it scrolls more then your window. If you are using a GUI and have nano open from a terminal and the file is not longer than your window you can use mouse and select all the text than cnt+shift+c will copy it to clipboard.

Although not in nano, there is a way in vim. See here.

Specifically, select text (visual mode) section.

Answer 6

In vi we can easily do this.

suppose if you want to copy entire file content to some other file then try this

open your original file then in the command line write this

:w file1

here your entire file content will be copied to file1

suppose if you want to copy only part of the file then try this

first enable line numbering using this command

:setnu

After that if you want to copy from line number 10 to 23 then write this command in the command line

:10,23w file2

This will copy the content from line number 10 to 23 to file2