What is the fastest way to add email / markdown citation to some block of text?

Question

I often have some text block on a website a PDF file, etc. that I want to add email / markdown style citation to.

So for example I want to turn this:

This is a quote that possible is very long and / or spans multiple lines.

Blablabla […]

And another line.

Into this:

> This is a quote that possible is very long and / or spans multiple lines.
> 
> Blablabla […]
> 
> And another line.

What is a faster way to do this than manually adding > in front of every line?

Answer 1

I wrote a small shell script to solve the problem:

#!/bin/sh
CLIPBOARD=`xclip -selection clipboard -o`
MODDED_CLIPBOARD=`echo "$CLIPBOARD" | sed 's/^/> /'`
echo "$MODDED_CLIPBOARD" | xclip -selection clipboard -i

It reads the clipboard, adds > in front of every line and puts the result back into the clipboard.

Of course with files it's even easier:

sed 's/^/> /' filename