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When I paste into the terminal, sometimes what is in the clipboard is not what I expected. Specifically, it is sometimes pages and pages of text from a website.

When this happens, the terminal goes crazy, blinking rapidly and spitting out command not found as fast as it can.

I am afraid that someday the text will contain something like rm -rf /.

What is the best way to:

  • act when I make such a mistake?
  • prevent such a mistake from occurring?

For details, I use bash in GNU screen windows in a urxvt terminal on Linux.

The usual Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Z have no effect in my experience.

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I break a cold sweat every time it happens to me... Don't work under root and have backups. I also use a "scrap" file in a text editor to test what I copied from a web site, since with browsers you can never be sure what exactly you just copied. – haimg Nov 9 '11 at 6:35
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1 Answer

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To safely paste, you could invoke a text editor in bash using CTRL-X E. The shell builtin fc will bring up an editor with the last command.

Short of killing the shell/terminal, I am not sure if there is any way to kill something after you have pasted something in, and it has gone wrong.

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