Eric Mason . net

Getting text out of your SSH sessions can be annoying.  If it fits in a screen, I usually just select the text in PuTTY to copy it– no big deal.  Otherwise, I have to either email it to myself or put it in a file, log in with WinSCP, and download the file.  Way too much trouble.

Today I started searching for a better solution and found a patch for PuTTY by Diomidis Spinellis.  Unfortunately it was for an old version of PuTTY.  However with a little effort I updated the patch to PuTTY 0.60.

Here’s how it works:

1. Use the modified PuTTY
2. When connecting (or after) click on the Terminal setting, and under “Printer to send ANSI printer output to” select “Windows clipboard”
3. Add the following to your .bashrc (or the appropriate startup file for your shell)  To use it immediately, be sure to type “source .bashrc”

   function wcl {
     echo -ne '\e''[5i'
     cat $*
     echo -ne '\e''[4i'
     echo "Copied to Windows clipboard" 1>&2
   

   }

4. Now when you want some text out of SSH, just pipe it to wcl.   For instance, “ls -la |wcl” places the output of “ls -la” in your Windows clipboard.

Modified PuTTY 0.60 executable

Patch for PuTTY 0.60