Terminal Text Copy – How to Copy Text from One Terminal into Another

You could use script (use -f to make sure it flushes every time) and you can have all the output in a file.

Use a terminal multiplexer (screen, tmux etc). For instance, for screen http://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/screen_11.html#

Command: copy Enter copy/scrollback mode. This allows you to copy text from the current window and its history into the paste buffer. In this mode a vi-like full screen editor is active, with controls as outlined below.

Other terminal multiplexers surely have more advanced capabilities.

Copy-paste is older than the mouse. The first unix editor, ed, had the t command to copy a bunch of lines to a different location. In vi, there are various commands to cut, yank and paste text. To copy text between files, you would save the text to copy in a temporary file and import that temporary file in the target document, e.g. with w and r in ed (:w and :r in vi). To include the output of a command in a file, you would redirect its output (mycommand >file or mycommand >>file) and import that file into your document; vi introduced the ! command and friends to directly insert the output without requiring a temporary file.

Loading a man page into Vim or Emacs and copy-pasting from it is routine for Vim/Emacs users. Web browsers didn't exist until Unix was old enough to drink, but the same principle applies anywhere: the clipboard is older than window environments. What window environments brought was cross-application copy-paste, which could be done with only a little more effort through files.