Ubuntu – How to easily share the output of a command or a text file with others

command line

I recently asked a question on Ask Ubuntu (or somewhere else), and a comment or answer asks me to paste the contents of some file or the output of a command to troubleshoot my problem.

How do I do that?

Best Answer

How to easily share all or part of some text file (or the output of a command)

You'll paste the file or command output to Ubuntu's "pastebin" service, and then allow others to look at it by simply sharing a link, or use it yourself to further copy and paste a few lines into your question.

Note: If your problem involves the Software Center, Update Manager or apt-get not working, you may have to use the Alternate Method near the bottom of this answer.

1. Start the terminal

The terminal allows you to interact with your system by typing commands, instead of using the mouse/cursor. It's not hard to use when you have instructions, and can make some tasks very easy to accomplish.
Press the Ctrl+Alt+T keys together (at the same time) to start the terminal. This will work for everyone using regular Ubuntu, but if you're using...
- Lubuntu: Click on the Start button, go to Accessories, and click on LXTerminal
- Xubuntu: Right-click anywhere on the desktop, and click on Open Terminal Here
- Kubuntu: Click on the Start button, type konsole in the Search box, and click on Konsole
- You will get a window with a solid background, showing your username and your computer name, like the below (size/colors may differ!):

2. Install pastebinit, a small tool to paste text from the terminal

In your terminal, type sudo apt-get install pastebinit and press Enter
Enter your password and press Enter (what you type won't show, don't worry)
When asked Do you want to continue?, type Y and press Enter, and wait for the prompt (user@machine) to return.

3. Pastebin the file or command and paste its URL on AskUbuntu

Go back to your browser, select the exact filename (or command) whose content you were asked to paste, and press Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard.
- A filename may look something like /etc/apt/sources.list, while a command may simply be something like dmesg or grep -i failed /var/log/auth.log. The answer or comment will tell you explicitly if it's a file or a command.
Now, for a file, type pastebinit in the terminal, follow with a space; then right-click on the cursor and click on Paste to paste the filename you copied.
Press Enter, and after a few seconds you will see a link of the form http://paste.ubuntu.com/ as shown below. Move your mouse over it, and it will be underlined -- then right-click and click on Copy Link Address to copy it link to your clipboard:
But for a command, copy and paste the command in the terminal first, and then type
| pastebinit after it, and press Enter (see screenshot below)
- The | symbol may be obtained by pressing Shift+\, which is usually below the Backspace key.
- Move your mouse over the link--it will be underlined--right-click and Copy Link Address as explained above.

4. Paste the link into your AskUbuntu question/comment

Go back to your browser, and add a comment (or edit your question) with the Pastebin link - just press Ctrl+V to paste it. Save the edited question or add the comment, and that's it!

5. Optional: View your pastebin link, and only paste selected lines from it into your AskUbuntu

You can also paste the link into your browser's address bar, or click on the link after you've added/edited it to AskUbuntu, to view it on pastebin. It will look similar to this:
- Notice the line numbers. You can also copy and paste selected/requested lines from here directly into your AskUbuntu question.
- Please enclose the pasted lines with the <pre> and </pre> tags as shown below, so that it appears as separate lines in the question instead of being jumbled together:

Alternate way to pastebin a file using an editor

This may be useful if you are having a problem with Software Center, Update Manager or apt-get and cannot install pastebinit; it only works for files, not commands.

Select and copy the filename from AskUbuntu into your clipboard with Ctrl-C.
Open a terminal as shown in Step 1 and type gedit, followed by a space, and then right-click to paste the filename as in Step 3 and press Enter
- Lubuntu users type leafpad instead of gedit; Kubuntu users type kate
The editor will open with the file:
Click anywhere inside the editor window, and press Ctrl+A. All the text should now be highlighted in another color:
Now press Ctrl+C (or the Copy button, if you know where that is) to copy the entire file to the clipboard.
Go to your browser, and open paste.ubuntu.com. Type your name/nickname in the Poster: box; then click in the Content: box and press Ctrl+V to paste the text you just copied from the editor in there:
Click on the Paste button, and in a few seconds you'll see the text you pasted:
Select the address shown in the address bar (highlighted orange above), copy it with Ctrl+C, and then go back to AskUbuntu and paste it in as explained in Step 4.
Alternately, select a few lines, copy them and then paste them in AskUbuntu as explained in Step 5.

Step 1: Load a terminal...

The first step is opening a terminal. There are a multitude of different terminal options out there but most Ubuntu users will have gnome-terminal, KDE users tend to have konsole, and XFCE users should have xfce4-terminal.

Once you have identified which command you want to run, it's just a case of running it.

Press Ctrl+Alt+T.
Unity and Gnome Shell users can search for Terminal.
KDE users can find Konsole under Applications → System.
All desktops can press Alt+F2 and type in the terminal binary name (as above) manually.

Step 2: Running your command

This is the simple bit. You should be looking at something like the following:

enter image description here

You can either type the command, or you can copy it (select the text, right click, "Copy", then right click the terminal, "Paste"). Copy & Paste is recommended for long commands. We want to avoid errors in transcription!

When you have typed or pasted the command into this window, press Return. Output should now appear on the screen as below:

enter image description here

Step 3: Copying the content

Copying is similar to most other applications apart from most consoles only know how to copy "blocks". To copy, simply use your mouse to drag around the output until it is highlighted, like so:

enter image description here

Right click on the terminal (to go to the Edit menu) and select "Copy". Then you can go back to your browser or editor and paste. We're done.

Step 3.5: Alternative for copying:

Seeing as you're getting the hang of the command line now, you can also use a command called xclip to directly insert things into X's clipboard. This will only work if a GUI is running.

lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A1 | xclip -selection clip

Note: you can omit -selection clip but the data will be in your middle-click clipboard - yes, there are two clipboards... A story for another day, perhaps :)

Addendum: Extracting command line data without Copy & Paste

If you need to get the output from a computer that, for example, the display settings are so broken you can't get into a usable desktop, we have to find another method for extracting the output. You could do it by hand but often (in case of logs) this is impractical.

At the very least we need to get into a terminal which you can do by pressing: Control+Alt+F1.

You may need to log in.

From here we can run our command but the output will only show on the display. Now we have two options:

I have an internet connection

If you have access to the internet, you can simply "pipe" the output into a command called pastebinit. This uploads the content to http://paste.ubuntu.com and returns a short, easy to transcribe URL that you can access from another computer or just give to people.

pastebinit is not installed by default so the first thing we run is:

sudo apt-get install pastebinit

Then we run our command, followed by | pastebinit:

lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A1 | pastebinit

And you'll see something like the following (though obviously not in a window):

enter image description here

Write down the URL and you can share that with whomever you like.

I don't have an internet connection

This is more problematic but not unsurpassable. We will need some form of external storage. A USB stick is a popular example. Plug it in. In a non-graphical setting, USB drives are not automatically mounted. As I said, problematic.

Run lsblk and you should see something like this:

NAME              MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda                 8:16   0 111,8G  0 disk  
├─sda1              8:17   0   100M  0 part  /boot
├─sda2              8:18   0     1G  0 part  /
├─sda3              8:19   0    20G  0 part  /usr
├─sda4              8:20   0     1K  0 part  
├─sda5              8:21   0  58,7G  0 part  
└─sda6              8:22   0    32G  0 part  [SWAP]
sdb                 8:96   1  14,5G  0 disk  
└─sdb1              8:97   1  14,4G  0 part
sr0                11:0    1   4,4G  0 rom   
sr1                11:1    1  1024M  0 rom

In my case, the new disk I've plugged in is that second one (sdb) and it has one partition (sdb1). We need to mount this so we can write to it. Simply:

sudo mount -o umask=0000 /dev/sdb1 /mnt

Then we can funnel our commands into new files on the external disk:

lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A1 > /mnt/lspci
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log >/mnt/xorg.log

That will create two new files on the external drive. You can also copy things to it with cp. When you're done you want to unmount the drive:

cd /  # just in case you cd'd into /mnt
sudo umount /mnt

Then you can unplug your drive and take it to another computer and upload the information as requested.

Best Answer

How to easily share all or part of some text file (or the output of a command)

1. Start the terminal

2. Install pastebinit, a small tool to paste text from the terminal

3. Pastebin the file or command and paste its URL on AskUbuntu

4. Paste the link into your AskUbuntu question/comment

5. Optional: View your pastebin link, and only paste selected lines from it into your AskUbuntu

Alternate way to pastebin a file using an editor

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to run a command and copy its output

Step 1: Load a terminal...

Step 2: Running your command

Step 3: Copying the content

Step 3.5: Alternative for copying:

Addendum: Extracting command line data without Copy & Paste

I have an internet connection

I don't have an internet connection

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